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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23568496">Stay</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood'>forthegreatergood</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman &amp; Terry Pratchett</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Coming Untouched, Developing Relationship, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Mutual Pining, Pining, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Self-Esteem Issues, Sleeping Together, Wings, abuse of ecstatic states, ineffable orgasms</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:47:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>20,064</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23568496</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the first day of the rest of their lives, and an angel and a demon are finally free.</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Touch me?” Aziraphale asked.  It was a plea and an invitation and a promise all in one, that hopeful tone of his making Crowley’s tongue accordion against his teeth in his rush to ask <i>where</i> and <i>how</i> and <i>really?</i>.</p>
<p>“How, ah, how do you want me to… ?” There was no dismissing the flush that crept up his neck at that, no dousing the fire that tremulous question had started.</p>
<p>“However you like.”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>238</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/raiining/gifts">raiining</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Post-Armageddon sequel to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/21878839">A Treatise Concerning Religious Affectations</a>.  Can probably be read as a stand-alone, but everything's closed, so why would you?</p>
<p>A huge thank you to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxyk/pseuds/foxyk">foxyk</a> for betaing this beast!</p>
<p>All characters property of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the respective production and licensing companies.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Aziraphale turned and closed the door of the bookshop behind him, locking it and renewing the wards that hadn’t come back on with Adam’s restoration.  Crowley was fairly confident that they’d earned themselves some breathing room, but still, it didn’t hurt to be cautious.  And really, Aziraphale would infinitely prefer to focus his attention on better, more comforting things--the fine meal filling his belly, the burden recently lifted from his shoulders, the charming company doubtless prowling about the shelves behind him, the prime vintage he had in mind for a nightcap.  </p><p>Keeping an eye on the door when he had all that right in front of him was, quite simply, not to be borne.  The wards might not stop a determined archangel or Prince, but they’d certainly let the two of them know they had company.  Anyway, there wasn’t any harm in it, and he’d feel better about having a tipple if he was sure they were up.  Aziraphale smiled to himself at the thought of the wine.  He’d been saving it for a special occasion that, between one thing and another, had never seemed to come--trying to save the world had been damnably hard work, with little room for joviality or respite--and if having survived their own executions didn’t count, he didn’t know what would.</p><p>Besides, the alcohol would settle Crowley down, and the three bottles he had laid in for just such an occasion meant that he could spin the evening out, keep refilling Crowley’s glass, chide him for even thinking of driving with so much under his belt, tuck him in on a sofa suddenly just the right length to sleep on.  It had been so long since the demon had let his guard down enough to sleep anywhere besides his own flat, with its far more aggressive set of wards.  Aziraphale swallowed and thought of the room upstairs, with its comfortable bed decked out in miraculously soft blankets and silken sheets and its cozy wooden bookshelves lined with the trashy novels Crowley would never admit to sneaking whenever Aziraphale’s back was turned and its plants blessed past needing him to do anything but smile at them every so often to keep them healthy and happy.</p><p>Crowley’s apartment was very beautiful, and very cold, and very little like a home.  It had been bad enough back in the ‘90s, with Crowley’s sprawling personal Eden to offset the chill.  Now, with the furniture that much more austere and the garden shrunk to a quarter of its previous size... Aziraphale bit his lip. </p><p>It was a showroom, a stage, and very nearly a tomb, and if he had his way, Crowley would never set foot in it again.  But if there was a way for Aziraphale to say “Oh, there’s a spare room upstairs, stay as long as you like.” that wouldn’t send Crowley bolting for the door like a fox catching the first hint of a hunting party, he’d need a mite longer than dinner and the drive back to think of it.  </p><p>It probably wouldn’t help that he’d constructed it as carefully as any trap, laid it out to make it as appealing as possible to one very specific person and forgotten that its intended audience was better acquainted than most with how often gift horses had a belly full of Greek soldiers.  He’d be lucky if he got a whole five seconds of Crowley being charmed before Crowley instinctively began looking for the bars, the hook, the price tag.  And still, he couldn’t bring himself to mar his work, to make it less than perfect, not when it was only what Crowley deserved.</p><p>Aziraphale took a little breath, steadying himself.  Better for now to stick with the sofa.  Maybe in a few months, once Crowley had calmed down a bit, and gotten some distance on all the miserable things Aziraphale had said to him, and all the horrible things Hell had tried to do to him, then Aziraphale could bring up the little bedsit above the shop.  For now, he made sure his best gracious-host smile was on his face when he turned back around to find Crowley.</p><p>“Ah.” Aziraphale blinked and pursed his lips, having expected Crowley to be any number of places that weren’t barely a foot away from him, staring at him like a starving animal.  Then Crowley was flinging himself at Aziraphale, and all he could manage was a strangled, “Oh.”</p><p>“’m sorry,” Crowley hissed in his ear, arms tight around Aziraphale’s chest and shoulders. “You can shout, or turn me out, or fucking deck me, once I let go--whatever you need.  But please, please, right now just let me--”</p><p>He broke off with a sniffle, his throat bobbing painfully against Aziraphale’s collarbone, and a shudder ran through his narrow chest.  Crowley’s fingers dug into Aziraphale’s coat, and Aziraphale carefully wrapped his own arms around Crowley’s waist.  That dredged a naked, heaving sob out of the demon, and Aziraphale let his arms tighten.  It had been a hard few days, hadn’t it?</p><p>“My dear,” he sighed, bringing one hand up to the back of Crowley’s head.  Crowley didn’t protest, but his shivering intensified, and Aziraphale stroked his hair. “Oh, my dear.  Why on Earth would I do any of that?  I love you.”</p><p>Crowley buried his face in Aziraphale’s shoulder at that, the fabric not enough to muffle Crowley’s choked crying, and Aziraphale could only keep holding him and stroking his hair.  It had been a hard few days, and they’d both said so much they hadn’t meant, and if Crowley hadn’t had the holy water, God only knew…</p><p>Aziraphale forced himself to keep his grip on Crowley firm but not smothering.  Crowley had wanted to run away, and he’d stayed because he wouldn’t leave Aziraphale behind, and he’d almost paid for that bit of loyalty with his life.  Aziraphale imagined facing down a pair of Dukes, if they kicked in the bookshop’s door and he was alone, knowing Heaven wouldn’t help him.  He probably wouldn’t have managed even the slightest bit of bravado, never mind Crowley’s brash “Got an old friend here.” He pressed his cheek to Crowley’s hair.  He’d caused so much trouble, not trusting the demon when he should have.</p><p>“My dear, is there anything I can do?” Aziraphale asked softly.</p><p>“Just…” Crowley wrenched his face out of Aziraphale’s coat with a hiss, blinking tears out of his eyes. “Just keep breathing.  Please.”</p><p>“Keep breathing?  That’s all?” Aziraphale asked, squeezing the back of his neck.  Crowley shuddered and closed his eyes, not quite as desperate as he had been when he rested his cheek on Aziraphale’s shoulder again.</p><p>“Bless it, angel, I thought I’d lost you.” His arms clutched at Aziraphale hard enough to make his ribs creak, and Aziraphale patted his back awkwardly.  Crowley hissed when he realized what he’d done, and he let go so suddenly Aziraphale had to scramble to keep hold of him.</p><p>“Shh,” Aziraphale sighed, pulling him back and holding him close. “Crowley, I’m sorry I said we weren’t friends, and that I didn’t like you.  I am.  You’re the best friend I could have ever wished for, and I love you a great deal.  You never came within a hair of losing me, and I’m sorry I made you think so.”</p><p>Crowley laughed at that, a strangled, hysterical bark of a thing, and Aziraphale kissed his temple and rocked him slowly, carefully.</p><p>“Not--” Crowley jerked his arm up and wiped his cheeks angrily with the cuff of his shirt. “Satan’s sake, angel.  When the shop burned.  When the shop burned, and there was no trace of you left anywhere in the fucking world, and I thought I’d gotten you fucking <i>annihilated</i>.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>Crowley laughed again, this time sharp enough that Aziraphale could have shaved with it. “‘Oh,’ he says. <i>Oh</i>! ”</p><p>Aziraphale hugged Crowley to him, putting enough strength into it that he didn’t need to worry about Crowley pulling away again.  It was too much, wasn’t it?  All piling up at once, a dam bursting now that they had time to realize there was too much behind it to hold.</p><p>Crowley drinking himself into a tear-stained oblivion instead of running.  Crowley wrenching desperately at the levers of reality because Aziraphale had begged him to.  Crowley sitting glass-eyed and spent on the white satin brick he called a couch, Agnes Nutter’s final prophecy in the fingers of one hand, the other buried in his hair like he might rip it out. “They’re going to try and burn you, angel.”</p><p>Aziraphale had wanted to argue, had looked up from the holy water he was cleaning off the floor to say that Heaven would never and couldn’t even if they wanted to, and had realized with a sickening sense of finality that if Heaven got its hands on hellfire, it would be by means of a trade.  A two-demon team had been sent to collect Crowley, and only one of them was liquified on the ground in front of him.  The other one had doubtless made his report by now, told the whole story to a Prince already furious beyond measure with Crowley.  Heaven could, if they agreed to hand over enough holy water to destroy a rebellious demon.  </p><p>Poetic justice, Hell would probably call it, sneering and laughing as they said it.  Heaven would probably write it off as a regrettable loss during the hostilities at the air base, if they even acknowledged it at all.</p><p>Aziraphale closed his eyes and ran his fingers through Crowley’s hair. “It was an accident, Crowley.  It wasn’t your fault.”</p><p>“Not from lack of trying, though, was it?” Crowley asked, sounding so dreadfully tired that Aziraphale couldn’t help pressing his cheek to Crowley’s throat. “I practically dared Her to do something about it with you not ten feet away.  I stood in the middle of the street with Hell already onto me and Heaven sniffing around you, yelling at you about running away with me like I was having a go on one of the trumpets.  I just kept dragging you deeper and deeper into this whole bloody mess, and you kept trying to tell me how dangerous it was, and I ignored you until it was too late, and then…” Crowley shivered against him, adam’s apple working as he tried to keep his voice steady. “And then, it was too late.”</p><p>Aziraphale held him close and breathed him in.  Not too late, never too late.</p><p>“It wasn’t, love.  It wasn’t.  And I did it to myself.  You were right, and I wouldn’t listen.  You knew what would happen, and I wouldn’t believe you.” Crowley squirmed in his arms, and Aziraphale curled his hand around the back of his neck, stilling him. “No one would have blamed you for leaving without me, but you didn’t.  You kept coming back for me, over and over again, trying to save me.  You <i>did</i> save me.”</p><p>They’d hardly been at their best, groping their way to the solution, but they’d done it.  Aziraphale had been cleaning up the holy water and trying not to think of everything that Crowley was--everything that animated that beloved creature--reduced to a polluted smudge, trying to wrench his mind away from the horror that could have so easily played out if he hadn’t finally trusted Crowley and given him what he’d known he’d need, and Crowley had simply said, “You’re not going back there.  I’m not letting them anywhere near you ever again, angel.  It’s not happening.”</p><p>He’d understood the impulse.  He’d thought of Hell coming for Crowley, and it had been the most natural thing in the world to think that if he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t protect Crowley, he’d rather go in his place than live with the knowledge that he’d failed.  It was unacceptable, the idea of Crowley battering himself to pieces against the might of Heaven in a futile attempt to save Aziraphale from a fate he’d risked willingly, but it was understandable.  Crowley, after all, loved him.</p><p>That had been the tipping point, hadn’t it?  That inescapable realization landing on him like an anvil.  Not just Crowley affectionate, indulgent, considerate.  Not just Crowley beaming and preening when Aziraphale praised him, not just Crowley craving Aziraphale’s approval, not just Crowley delighting in seeing him pleased.  </p><p>Even when it had been down to a stark calculation between abandoning Aziraphale and his own destruction, Crowley hadn’t been able to leave him behind.  Crowley had picked him over safety and security so many times over the millennia, but for Crowley to pick him when it flew in the face of every last self-preservation instinct a demon could possibly have, to pick him even after Aziraphale had rejected him… </p><p>It could only be because Crowley loved him.  Loved him more, in fact, than Crowley loved himself.  And if a demon could love that deeply, and that faithfully, and that selflessly, then how different could they really be, after all?  Aziraphale had been wrong, before.  There would be no explosion if they tried to share a corporation.</p><p>“Just like I saved you,” Aziraphale continued gently, rubbing the back of Crowley’s neck.  It still fit perfectly against his hand, the same way Crowley still felt so right in his arms.  They’d been orbiting each other so long, should he really be surprised at them having measured their corporations against one another? “I love you, my dear.  If you can forgive me for what I’ve done, and I can forgive you for what you’ve done, then there’s no sense in either of us suffering any more than we already have, is there?”</p><p>“I still thought I’d lost you,” Crowley muttered, crushing himself against Aziraphale’s chest.</p><p>“But you didn’t,” Aziraphale said. “You’re here with me, now, in the bookshop.” He turned enough that he could kiss Crowley’s brow. “Come sit down with me, love.  Hold my hand, and drink to the world with me, and… and just stay with me, all right?”</p><p>Crowley grunted, his grip on Aziraphale not slackening in the slightest. “Gonna be a few minutes, though.”</p><p>Aziraphale kissed him again, then manifested his wings and curled them tight around the pair of them.  Crowley hadn’t let him since the last time he’d submitted to a bout of ecstasy; Aziraphale had rather hoped the next time would be under better circumstances.  Things were as they were, though, and Crowley relaxed slightly as the warmth of Aziraphale’s wings registered.</p><p>“As long as you need, dear.  It’s just us, safe and sound, here together.”</p><p>Crowley made an incomprehensible noise that at least wasn’t a sob, and Aziraphale kept breathing.</p>
<hr/><p>Crowley felt the world tilt around him, and it was a testament to how much of Aziraphale’s wine he’d sucked down in the past few hours that he barely managed to twitch before finding himself coming to rest in the angel’s lap.  He scrabbled at the cushions, fingers finding purchase but no leverage in the upholstery as he tried to haul himself back up, something in the back of his brain still capable of screaming at him that he’d really cocked it up this time.  Gone too needy and shown too soft an underbelly, then gotten sloppy enough to try for more and overshot the mark by a mile.  </p><p>He’d just wanted to lean against Aziraphale’s shoulder, which probably wasn’t on thanks to his earlier performance, and he’d gone and dropped himself across Aziraphale’s legs instead.  This wasn’t what Aziraphale wanted from him, was it?  This wasn’t what Aziraphale kept him around for.  He was here to be needed, not to--</p><p>“Shh,” Aziraphale sighed, prying cushions out of his flailing arms with one hand and lifting his shoulder easily with the other. “Crowley, dear, it’s all right.”</p><p>He scooted down a few inches, then lowered Crowley gently, and Crowley found his cheek pillowed on the most extraordinarily soft, warm thigh as if it belonged there.  Aziraphale’s fingers went to his hair again, tangled in it, and rested there.  If Crowley closed his eyes as tightly as he wanted, tears would leak out, wouldn’t they?</p><p>He hadn’t understood what he was doing to himself, when he’d suggested the two of them set up in the Dowling household together.  He’d been trying to wring everything he could out of his time with Aziraphale before it all went to shit, trying to cram as many golden smiles and contented sighs and gently scolding looks as he could into the eleven years they had left.  He’d jerked off, half-drunk and utterly desperate, thinking of sneaking out to the angel in his cottage, of the angel sneaking into his room once everyone else in the house was asleep.  He’d made himself come, remembering that breathy “Kiss me!” and imagining what it might sound like whispered against his ear.</p><p>Once they’d gotten there, Aziraphale had been all business and focused like a laser, convinced they really could pull it off.  It had been half-contagious and half-warning, every impulse Crowley had ever had suddenly needing to be checked with a vengeance.  Every time he’d wanted to turn and smile indulgently at the angel had been met with a <i>don’t</i>.  Every time he’d wanted to reach for him, to offer him encouragement, to buy him dinner, to heal chafed hands or kiss dirt-stained knuckles, it had been don’t acknowledge, don’t make eye contact, don’t risk it, don’t fuck it all up--don’t, don’t, <i>don’t</i>.  Crowley had twisted himself into knots for a decade, played his part flawlessly and without respite, swallowed every single doubt and hoped.</p><p>Hope.  Crowley reached up, here and now and in the bookshop he’d seen burn, and let his hand flop gracelessly on top of Aziraphale’s.  Aziraphale’s hand, graceful and plump and real, somehow, in spite of everything.  Aziraphale’s corporation, solid and alive, because a child had a kneejerk conviction that possession wasn’t on.  Crowley let his grip go tight for a moment.</p><p>He’d spent eleven years running himself into walls over and over again, hoping that it would work and Aziraphale would still be speaking to him afterward, hoping that if it didn’t work at least his last look at Aziraphale wouldn’t be the angel’s face contorted in disappointment and anger and blame.  He’d gotten his full measure of that over the ages, couldn’t bear it if it was the last thing he saw.  </p><p>It had gotten to the point that he’d watch from a window as Aziraphale helped Warlock slip through a hedgerow or weave a daisy crown or pick flowers to make a bouquet for Mrs. Dowling, affection welling in his breast and then lodging in his throat like a stone in a teapot, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d hallucinated the entire previous decade.  </p><p>Sure, Aziraphale had never admitted to their little ‘practice’ sessions being pleasure rather than business, and sure, Crowley had never gotten another chance to get the angel off, and sure, he’d had to bin the whole thing before he made himself sick with all the things he wanted but could never have.  It had gotten to be like shoving his arms through a coil of razor wire at the end there, hands reaching for the prize on the other side, heart telling him it would all be worth it if only he could wrap his fingers around it.  </p><p>As if Aziraphale liking the look of him flushed and panting meant anything when the chips were down.  As if Aziraphale holding him and stroking his hair wouldn’t be dust in the wind the moment Heaven snapped its fingers.  As if Crowley could make it worth it, if Aziraphale ever did try to pick him over Heaven.  </p><p>But it had still happened, and sometimes Crowley had caught Aziraphale looking at him like he’d hoped it could happen again, and it had been real and wonderful right up until Crowley had said the magic word--<i>Armageddon</i>--and Crowley had discovered precisely how little it had all meant to Aziraphale.</p><p>Armageddon.  Crowley’d taken the baby because he’d had no choice, carried out his orders because he couldn’t refuse, but he’d have given his eye teeth in that moment for a chance to <i>think</i>, to come up with some way out of it.  </p><p>The birth of the Antichrist had taken the comfortable-enough situation Crowley had been clinging to, shaken it up like a snowglobe, and then smashed it on the pavement without the faintest breath of a warning, leaving Crowley wondering what had ever been real.  There’d been the inarguable facts--he and Aziraphale had a mutually beneficial arrangement vis-a-vis their jobs--and then there’d been everything else, everything scribbled into the margins of that contract over the centuries, all the little gentleman’s agreements they’d come to when it suited them.  It had let Crowley imagine things, read too much into everything, let himself get as lost in wishful thinking as humans did in opium.  </p><p>Projecting, that’s what they called it these days.  How else could he and Aziraphale have gone rocketing backwards from <i>that</i> to barely looking at each other in the space of a day?  Surely, Crowley had dreamed it all up in the grip of some feverish years-long nap.  Surely, it had meant about as much to Aziraphale as his card tricks and stage magic.</p><p>Aziraphale’s fingers--real, flesh and bone fingers, things the angel had again because sometimes the universe’s capriciousness cut in favor of kindness instead of cruelty--tightened in his hair, and Crowley took a deep breath and tasted nothing of soot or ash on his tongue.  He’d lost everything and then had it just handed back to him, neat as could be, all tidy and accounted for, and perhaps it was time to admit that his understanding of how things were and how things could be was not as sharp as it had been just a few days ago.</p><p>Aziraphale might have spent the past decade pretending they’d never been more than collaborators, might have denied him entirely when things were at their darkest.  But just as surely, Aziraphale had said that he loved him.  Just as surely, Aziraphale had gone to Hell for him.  Crowley tried to reconcile everything, tried to match it all up so the pieces fit together, and failed.</p><p>Aziraphale had listened to him say that he wasn’t going to let Gabriel anywhere near Aziraphale ever again, and agreed, and Crowley had thought every scrap of self-denial and pain had finally at least paid off.  The last thing he saw of Aziraphale wouldn’t be anger, or an argument.  And then Aziraphale had said, “You’ll deal with Heaven, and I’ll deal with Hell,” and Crowley had remembered what it was to argue with an absent God that he hadn’t meant it.  Aziraphale had looked up from the mess on the floor, awful and implacable and immovable, and told him that he didn’t intend to escape the fire just to lose everything to the flood.  If Crowley was to deal with the machinations of Heaven, then Aziraphale would descend into Hell.</p><p>Crowley stared at the unscorched, intact ceiling of a bookshop that shouldn’t be, from the lap of an angel who hadn’t burned in fires mundane or ethereal, and gave up trying to make sense of the world.  Some things simply were, and logic didn’t enter into it.</p><p>“You love me,” Crowley murmured, proud of himself for not slurring the words.  </p><p>He hadn’t hallucinated or imagined or tricked himself into believing in that much, at least.  It didn’t make sense, but he  <i>had</i> heard it.</p><p>He’d stood there in the bookshop with Aziraphale like it was any other day, like Heaven and Earth hadn’t just conspired to pry everything he’d ever loved out of his frantic, selfish grasp and burn it to nothing right before his eyes, and it had been like getting hit by a freight train.  He hadn’t been able to refrain from wrapping himself around Aziraphale and convincing himself that it was really true, that it had all come out all right in the end, that he really hadn’t lost his angel.  Hadn’t been able to stop himself, even when he’d known that that right there might have torn it, might have gotten him cast out of paradise without even a flaming sword to keep him warm.</p><p>And instead of punishing him for his hubris, of shoving him back down into the place he’d forgotten when he’d reached for something without offering anything in return, Aziraphale had held him close and said, “I love you.”</p><p>“Of course I love you, you ridiculous serpent,” Aziraphale sighed.  He let go of Crowley’s hair to take Crowley’s hand, then lifted it to his lips.  The warmth of that soft skin shot all the way down Crowley’s arm and made his heart beat more quickly. “I’m sorry I never said it before.  I just… I lived in such terror of losing you, Crowley.  I couldn’t stand the thought of you going any more reckless than you already were, or taking bigger risks than you already did.  It felt like the only card I had to play sometimes--that need you had for my validation.”</p><p>“I’d never leave you, angel,” Crowley said, frowning.  He’d thought he’d gotten that much across, at least--it had never been a game, or a trick, or a diversion.  It had been thousands upon thousands of years since it had been interest and curiosity rather than affection and need bringing him back to Aziraphale’s side.</p><p>“That wasn’t what I was worried about,” Aziraphale scoffed. “Though you know, you haven’t…”</p><p>“Haven’t what?” Crowley asked, when Aziraphale didn’t continue.  He should miracle himself sober, but at the same time he was sure he’d turn into a complete mess if he did.  He could lie here on Aziraphale’s thigh and feel like a stunned ox and float in a pleasant, warm sea of wine and exhaustion and simply <i>not think</i> about how much everything was going to hurt once it all wore off.  If he was obviously and clearly too drunk to even begin dealing with things, planning things, recontextualizing things, then he didn’t have to.  It was self-explanatory, obvious and for the best.  </p><p>Except, of course, for the bit where he needed all his faculties in prime working order if he was going to navigate something like this without it all blowing up in his face.</p><p>There was really only so much at a time Aziraphale was going to put up with from him, wasn’t there?  There was a limit.  Some invisible clock had already been started, an unknowable countdown already set in motion, and when it hit zero, he’d go from comfortable and loved on a couch with an angel to alone and miserable on the sidewalk, trying to hold his guts in with tired and clumsy hands and wondering if it was really worth all the trouble.</p><p>“Said it back,” Aziraphale murmured.</p><p>“Muh?” One last wall to slam into, Crowley thought.  Aziraphale couldn’t really want...</p><p>Aziraphale reached down and brushed Crowley’s hair back from his forehead. “I know you do, love.  I don’t doubt it, I promise.  It’s just, well, nice to <i>hear</i> it, too.”</p><p>“Oh.” Just like that, it seemed.  Aziraphale <i>could</i>.  And from him, of all people.  Crowley blinked slowly at the ceiling. “I suppose… um.  That is.  Bless it, angel.”</p><p>“I understand if, ah.” Aziraphale kissed his hand again, then let it rest against his downy cheek. “If it’s too much, at the moment.”</p><p>“No,” Crowley said.  He pulled his hand free and shoved himself awkwardly up to half-sit, half-sprawl.  He blinked up at Aziraphale, trying to focus.  He was always so beautiful, the brilliance of his true form bleeding through at the edges, the indelible marks of his longterm habitation in the details.  There was no wrinkle, no heaviness, no hair or mark or mole, that graced Aziraphale’s corporation without his say-so; the angel’s pleasure and the angel’s will were evident in every curve and callus.  Crowley could see him every day for the rest of eternity and still not tire of the view. “No, it’s not.”</p><p>He twisted around, trying to look into Aziraphale’s eyes even as the room swam and wobbled, and he should just sober up, except that then he’d just throw himself into Aziraphale’s arms and burst into tears again.  He’d been so sure that after everything--everything he’d denied himself, every track he’d covered, every time he’d kept the angel at arm’s length, everything he’d denied Aziraphale--his eleventh-hour carelessness had gotten Aziraphale killed.  He’d been so sure that the only thing left for him had been the relief of a timely execution.</p><p>Aziraphale huffed irritably and wrapped his arms around Crowley’s torso, and suddenly Crowley found himself sitting in Aziraphale’s lap and pressed firmly but gently to Aziraphale’s chest. </p><p>“There we are,” Aziraphale said, sounding a sort of satisfied that bordered on smug.</p><p>Crowley let himself give in to that warm, comfortable embrace. “I love you, angel.”</p><p>“Oh, Crowley.”</p><p>Aziraphale’s fingers were back in his hair, and he could feel the concentrated, burning bliss radiating from the center of the angel’s being.  Crowley exhaled slowly.  No sense at all in sobering up--he’d just be drunk again in three seconds flat on everything spilling off Aziraphale.  He rested his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder and stared at the perfectly manicured hands resting lightly on his arms.</p><p>“Even when I was so angry with you I could spit nails, even when it scared the heaven out of me, even when I was sure it would be the end of me, I loved you.  Probably keep it up til the end of time, too, if you let me.” So many times, it had been all he’d wanted, to curl up against Aziraphale like this and tell the angel that he was loved. <i>I’d do anything for you, angel, anything at all, say the word and it’s yours, I only want you to be happy.</i> He’d just been so sure it was the absolute dead last thing Aziraphale had wanted to hear out of his mouth.</p><p>Aziraphale sighed at that, those soft tree-trunk arms of his tightening just a fraction around Crowley’s ribs. </p><p>“Again?” he asked, quiet and hesitant.  So used to getting denied, to getting the bare minimum and the occasional afterthought and told it was more than he deserved.</p><p>“I love you.” Crowley tucked his nose under Aziraphale’s jaw and let the smell of his cologne warming on his skin and the feel of his pulse just under the surface soothe the jitters out of him. “When you were gone, it was like all the color in the world went with you.  I couldn’t stand the idea of never seeing you smile again, of never hearing you say ‘well, <i>really</i>’ at some trifling inconvenience, of never feeling you pull some stunt from all the way across London and thinking how pleased with yourself you must be.”</p><p>“I’m not as vain as all that,” Aziraphale protested, his hand finding the back of Crowley’s neck again, fingers rubbing tenderly at the corded muscles there.  Crowley’s cheeks flushed at the thought of how it had been last time he’d been in Aziraphale’s lap, spent and boneless and dizzy with the increasingly inventive and prolonged ecstatic fits Aziraphale had provoked.  It had been like drowning in honey, those episodes--all sweetness and weight pulling him down and making him never want to stir from that soft embrace.</p><p>“You deserve to be as vain as you want,” Crowley told him, conviction bone-deep and unshakeable. “You’re clever and faithful and true and--”</p><p>Aziraphale cut him off with a kiss, and Crowley wondered if it was possible to spontaneously combust from just that, for him to burn to ash in Aziraphale’s lap from the suddenly searing heat of Aziraphale’s lips.</p><p>Crowley let himself clutch at Aziraphale’s shoulders frantically, let himself push back against the endless pleasure of that soft mouth, let his jaw relax and his lips part and Aziraphale’s tongue slide against his own.  When Aziraphale leaned back, breaking the kiss, they stared at each other wordlessly for a long, long moment.</p><p>“I never understood how anyone could know you and not love you,” Crowley finished, his voice barely rising above a whisper.</p><p>“Oh, <i>Crowley</i>,” Aziraphale said, his eyes bright and wet. “You’re too…” He cradled Crowley’s face in his hands, palms warm against Crowley’s jaw. “How could they have ever raised a hand to you?”</p><p>“If they managed to find the wherewithal to try and kill you, I imagine it was blessed easy to want me gone, too,” Crowley grunted.  </p><p>He burrowed back against Aziraphale’s chest, where he was spared the sight of those beautiful eyes gone sad and aching, the knowledge that even a longed-for declaration of love could leave Aziraphale barely better than melancholy.  He burrowed back against Aziraphale’s chest, where he could press his ear to the angel’s sternum and listen to the heartbeat that told him in no uncertain terms that Heaven had failed--Aziraphale was whole and warm and alive.  Heaven had failed, and Crowley could do better.  He had time, now, to be better at it, to make Aziraphale happier.</p><p>“You’ll stay the night, won’t you?” Aziraphale asked, tipping the scales in his favor with fingers combing through Crowley’s hair.</p><p>Crowley grunted noncommittally and tried to lose himself in the buzzing hum of Aziraphale’s voice as conducted through his chest.  It was too much, wasn’t it?  Aziraphale thought he wanted it, thought he wouldn’t get tired of Crowley’s clinging and gawping and mewling, and Crowley would send the whole thing straight to hell in record time.  He couldn’t just keep drinking, had to sober up some time, and when he did it was going to be that much harder not to think of Aziraphale alone, burning alive because Heaven couldn’t stand the sight of an angel who’d really loved humanity.  The last words Aziraphale had almost heard were Gabriel telling him how much he was hated.</p><p>Crowley’s hands dug into the couch behind Aziraphale, tunneling between warm cushion and warmer flesh to let Crowley get his arms around the angel.  No, Crowley was going to sober up sometime, and he’d probably come properly unspooled when he did, and Aziraphale would sit there regretting asking him to stay but too kind to ask him to leave.  Aziraphale would sit there regretting the whole thing, remembering every reason he hadn’t done it before.</p><p>He was probably assuming Crowley loving him wouldn’t look much different from another angel loving him, all picturesque and restrained and dignified, a half-dozen pretty tears rolling down pink cheeks, a breathy sigh and a gentle smile.  Love like a freshly steamed pork bun and a cup of tea on a miserable day, love like a small fire and a thick blanket on a dark night.  Sweet and decorous--things Crowley’d only ever been to make an audience feel his mockery of it.  No, it wouldn’t do.  Better to keep the ugliness out of Aziraphale’s sight, bury it behind marble slabs and concrete walls and thick hardwood doors where it belonged.</p><p>“It’s just… I worry about you, alone in that place,” Aziraphale said, fingers wending their way through Crowley’s hair, tugging idly at a stray lock or two. “I can’t help it.  I was always afraid of coming to look for you and finding the door forced like that, of you gone and no getting you back.”</p><p>Crowley shuddered.  He’d known it was bound to happen sooner or later, Hell being what it was, but he’d never seen fit to worry Aziraphale with it.  Had it been the same for the angel and the bookshop, Crowley never thinking Heaven would turn on him like <i>that</i> and Aziraphale knowing but never saying?</p><p>“They’ll leave us be, at least for a bit,” Crowley assured him.  Aziraphale didn’t relax against him, instead giving his own unconvinced hum.  </p><p>The angel was too clever for Crowley’s own good, sometimes.  Heaven had probably meant it when they’d promised to stand down, utterly lacking the imagination it took to lie about something like that in the heat of the moment.  Hell?  Utterly lacking in imagination, too, but that just made them all the more likely to fall back on their usual bullshit when the complicated artistic stuff failed, send someone round with a holy relic to finish him off the old-fashioned way when the ethereal tag-team was a wash.  Running the numbers and choosing the safer course, letting sleeping dogs lie--that all took introspection and planning, things Hell was in short supply of these days.</p><p>But really, it probably wouldn’t be for a while, and if it was going to happen now, Crowley certainly didn’t want it happening where Aziraphale could put himself in the crossfire.</p><p>“Are you sure I got all the holy water up, last night?” Aziraphale asked.  Crowley frowned at that, looking for a question under the question like a spider sussing out the difference between its web moving from a meal or an errant breeze.  </p><p>Aziraphale had banished him from half the apartment, not letting him within ten paces of the demon-fouled doorway until Aziraphale had been absolutely positive that the whole mess had been cleaned up and there was no danger of Crowley pratfalling his way into a deeply and dramatically ironic grave.  Aziraphale had a penchant for fussing at the best of times, and they’d had a distinct lack of those lately.</p><p>“’s perfectly safe, angel,” Crowley assured him, rubbing small circles into his back through the half-mile of fabric Aziraphale was always wearing, even inside and at his leisure.  Crowley couldn’t help but smile at the angel’s idea of armor, these days.  Precious, radiant Aziraphale, with his heart like an ocean.  It wasn’t fair, how little he asked for and how much less he was always given.  Crowley smiled and kept rubbing, trying to soothe the angel into a mood better suited to his newfound freedom. “You did such a thorough job, cleaning it all up.  I’m sorry you got saddled with it--figured it was a one-and-done sort of deal.  A bastard like Ligur should’ve had more than enough unholy to suck up any leftover power in one little thermos.”</p><p>“But what about--”</p><p>“Angel, it’s all right,” Crowley told him, managing a smile.  Poor thing--Crowley’s outburst had spoiled the expansive good mood dinner had left them with. “It is.  Everything’s fine.”</p><p>Aziraphale sighed and tugged at his collar, and then Crowley very much did not have half a mile of fabric to contend with in his abortive attempt at a backrub.  He swallowed around the uptick in his pulse, trying not to think too hard on the last time he’d gotten to see the angel stripped down to his shirtsleeves.  The fine dusting of silver hair on the angel’s chest, the soft swell of his belly in repose, the way his knees fell open ever so slightly, lips following suit…</p><p>Crowley tentatively started moving again, slow, careful circles where the wings would manifest, where that tightness of keeping them in always seemed to settle and ossify.</p><p>“But what if I just want you to stay?” Aziraphale asked, his voice very small and his brows drawn.</p><p>Crowley pursed his lips, realized that “ohyesofcoursewhydidn’tyousayI’dloveto” was perhaps not the right answer even if it was the one that wanted to come flying out of his mouth like buckshot from a gun barrel--just as inelegant and twice as destructive--and coughed. “Are you sure, angel?  I mean, that is, I don’t <i>expect</i>... I wasn’t angling for…”</p><p>Crowley trailed off, shrinking back slightly to see if his flailing had somehow struck true.  The sort of blood-alcohol content that could catch any freeloading mosquitoes their own drink-driving charge wasn’t conducive to teasing out the gaps that still showed up at the worst times--the gratitude Aziraphale sometimes showed not because he wanted to or felt it but because forgetting the performance would result in a reprimand, the penchant for self-tempting Crowley couldn’t always rein in and would balloon into full-blown delusions if he let it.  Bad habits they’d picked up elsewhere and couldn’t always shed when it was just the two of them.</p><p>“I’m sure,” Aziraphale said, settling it with arms wrapped around Crowley’s waist and a clear intention not to move them again for the rest of the evening. “I know you’re tired, and it’s been a long… well, decade, really.  But you’re not really in a state to go anywhere, and there’s the whole shop to stretch out in, and I don’t feel like opening to customers tomorrow, so.” He took a small preparatory breath, then leaned forward and kissed Crowley again, warm and gentle this time. “Please, stay the night.”</p><p>“As long as you like, angel,” Crowley assured him.</p><p>Aziraphale beamed at him and wriggled his shoulders. “Move your hand, my dear?”</p><p>Crowley tucked his hands into his lap and frowned.  He hadn’t meant to be forward about it, hadn’t meant to…</p><p>Aziraphale leaned forward slightly, manifested his wings, and wrapped them around the pair of them with a decisive beat that made Crowley’s hair blow into his face.  Aziraphale chuckled and brushed it back into place.</p><p>“Sorry,” he said sheepishly, blushing. “It’s just… we’re really free, aren’t we?  You can stay here, and I can…” He broke off, squeezing Crowley to him and tightening his wings. “I love you.  Oh, Crowley, I love you!”</p><p>“I love you too, angel,” Crowley said, fighting down an answering blush on his own cheeks.  He was staring, and he was too drunk not to stare.  Aziraphale was glowing with how delighted he was, pleased with himself and at ease and, oh, <i>Satan</i>, had Crowley been waiting for so long to see him like that and think it could last.  It wasn’t just playing pretend this time, wasn’t just a few hours sneaked behind their bosses’ backs, knowing they’d have to bend the knee and pay lip-service to the cause in no time at all.</p><p>Aziraphale’s hand curled around the back of his neck again, warm and heavy and soothing, and Crowley let himself melt down in the angel’s lap.  It was nice, Aziraphale holding him like that, and beyond that niceness of it, there was that never quite dismissed suspicion that Aziraphale let his hand rest on the nape of Crowley’s neck because he liked to, let his fingertips tease the fine curls at Crowley’s hairline because he enjoyed doing it, that it was actively pleasurable instead of merely expected or instinctive or a convenient way of quieting him when Aziraphale was sick of listening to him prattle on.</p><p>“Touch me?” Aziraphale asked.  It was a plea and an invitation and a promise all in one, that hopeful tone of his making Crowley’s tongue accordion against his teeth in his rush to ask <i>where</i> and <i>how</i> and <i>really?</i>.</p><p>“How, ah, how do you want me to… ?” There was no dismissing the flush that crept up his neck at that, no dousing the fire that tremulous question had started.</p><p>“However you like.”</p><p>Crowley couldn’t stop the grin threatening to split is face at that.  However he liked.  Carte blanche. “Oh, <i>angel</i>.”</p><p>Aziraphale’s answering smile was shy, pleased, and very, very bright.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Aziraphale sighed and tried to stretch without disturbing the demon in his lap.  He winced at the crick in his neck, then miracled it away along with his incipient headache.  Crowley had settled down finally, worn himself out, and what a catastrophe it had all been.  He’d thought he’d been so clever, asking Crowley to touch him.</p><p>Aziraphale closed his eyes and let his head rest on the back of the couch.  He hadn’t expected the effort it had taken to get Crowley to stay, had somehow thought that everything would just fall into place once Crowley had admitted to loving him.  And then it had been maddening, Crowley’s hands on him, comforting him, and all of it barely registering through the appalling number of layers he’d somehow put between himself and the demon.  He’d gotten more out of the intent pouring off Crowley than he had from the physical act, and once he’d rid himself of the excess clothing, he’d gotten barely a minute of it before Crowley had tucked his hands into his lap like an errant schoolboy, picking at his cuticles and crooking his fingers, every twitch of his lips an unasked question.</p><p>He’d realized that it was a risk, of course, telling a drunken demon to do as he liked with Aziraphale’s corporation.  Not that Crowley would hurt him on purpose, but accidents happened, and affectionate enthusiasm didn’t paper over everything.  He hadn’t counted on his own high-strung heart shattering at the worst possible moment, shivering apart like a hot glass plunged into ice water.</p><p>Crowley had been through so much in the past week, and Aziraphale hadn’t been as helpful there as he could have been, had he?  No--he’d been frightened of what Armageddon meant, and instead of reaching out to Crowley, instead of trying to weather it together, he’d told Crowley that he didn’t even like him.  He’d sent him away, called him names, swung forgiveness like a club.  And Crowley had been so very drunk, and so wrapped up in his hurts and his fears, and Aziraphale had been so pleased at getting him to stay, at the fact that he <i>could</i> stay.</p><p>What else could he have ever expected, really?</p><p>Trembling fingers undoing the buttons of his shirt, reverent hands stroking over his skin, a dusting of kisses and nibbles light as breath, Crowley’s nails through his hair just hard enough to raise gooseflesh on his arms, Crowley’s eyes on him like he never wanted to look away… Crowley had treated him like something infinitely precious, infinitely loved, infinitely desired.  It had been impossible not to remember how careful Crowley had always been of him, how eager Crowley had always been to see him smile.  It had been impossible not to remember how even at his most quarrelsome, Crowley had never denied him anything, had barely needed to be asked for anything, had never treated him like he was unloved or worthless.</p><p>And instead of reveling in it, in getting what he’d always wanted, in finally being allowed to wallow in the full force of that love, Aziraphale had gone and ruined everything by bursting into tears.</p><p>The horror that had swept over Crowley’s face had been awful.  The shuddering, frantic attempt to throw himself out of Aziraphale’s lap had been even worse, but the coup de grace had to have been that begging, whispered mantra of “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please, I’ll make it up to you, whatever I did, I’m <i>sorry</i>!” running over and around and through Aziraphale trying to hold onto him, trying to explain, trying to tell him not to stop, that he couldn’t bear it if Crowley stopped.</p><p>Crowley had curled in on himself, a snake recoiling from some terrible wound, shielding himself the only way he could, and it had been so, so long before Aziraphale had managed to pull himself together, had managed to do more than sob and clutch Crowley to him and tell him it was fine, really, it was fine.  He’d been sucked under and spit back out gasping and bruised, Crowley in his arms and loving him with every mote of the demon’s infernal, supposedly-loveless being and not because Aziraphale had done anything to deserve it.</p><p>“We could just pretend yesterday never happened,” Crowley offered, his voice a hoarse croak.  He didn’t stir, the only thing moving his jaw and his ribs, and Aziraphale wrapped his arms around the bony creature and hugged him tight.  He checked the impulse to manifest his wings again, remembering too sharply how Crowley had twitched away from the snow-white feathers once Aziraphale had started crying.</p><p>“You can’t touch me with that much love in your heart and then ask me to live without it,” Aziraphale said, shocked at the dry-gravel crunch of his own voice.  He miracled them both a cup of tea, cradling Crowley against his chest and trying to ignore how drained he felt.  He’d been afraid to close his eyes the whole night, afraid that if he let his attention lapse for even a moment, he’d find himself alone.  The fear and worry had gnawed at him, and the need for everything to be all right had clawed at him, and he was so damned tired. “Please, Crowley.  I’m sorry I upset you so badly, but I… I didn’t mean to.  And I love you too much to bear the thought of letting go now.”</p><p>He combed his fingers through Crowley’s hair and sipped his tea, and after a moment Crowley lifted his own cup and drank.  The warmth of the tea seeped into Aziraphale’s throat, and the comfort of it revived him a bit, and once it was gone he sighed.</p><p>“Can I kiss you again, please?” he asked.</p><p>Crowley twisted his spine and leaned back, his eyes puffy and lined and bruised with his own fatigue, and Aziraphale couldn’t help but run the back of his hand over one hollow cheek.  Crowley tilted his head into it.</p><p>“Angel, you went on a two-hour crying jag because I--”</p><p>“I went on a two-hour crying jag because I’ve been in love with you for I don’t even know how long now--it feels like forever--and I’ve been awful to you, and even if I hadn’t spent the last week giving you every reason to turn away from me, I’d never have imagined you could love me back so deeply.” Aziraphale swallowed and cupped Crowley’s jaw.  He didn’t want to stop touching him, even for a moment, and he’d never imagined it could hurt so much even as it felt so wonderful. “I certainly never thought I’d find all that out the same day I had to watch you get dragged off to an execution chamber.”</p><p>Crowley leaned into his touch, rubbing his face against Aziraphale’s hands like a cat.</p><p>“I’m sorry--I am.  I didn’t expect, well, any of it.  And once it started, I couldn’t seem to stop, or string two words together, or even come up with the right words <i>for</i> it.” Aziraphale leaned forward and brushed a gentle kiss over Crowley’s lips, then sat back. “Forgive me?”</p><p>Crowley sighed and swayed forward, crossing his arms carefully over Aziraphale’s chest and pressing his lips to Aziraphale’s without demand or hunger.  Aziraphale tried to meet him there, tried to keep it from raising the absolute havoc it wanted to with his heart even as a fire coiled in his belly.</p><p>“You really love me?” Crowley asked softly, when he broke away to rest fully against Aziraphale’s chest, fingers tugging idly at the buttons of his open shirt.</p><p>“Can I--” Aziraphale’s arms wrapped around Crowley’s back almost of their own accord. “That is, would you let me carry you?  I’d like to show you something.”</p><p>“Nothing wrong with my legs, but if it means that much to you…” Crowley shrugged, hands belying his tone as they twisted in Aziraphale’s shirt.</p><p>Aziraphale scooped him up before he could change his mind, stood up and moved to the staircase.  It was too much, too much and too soon, and he was going to frighten Crowley away, but if Crowley was ever going to believe him after that, it might be from something like this.</p><p>Crowley’s arms wrapped around his shoulders, face buried in Aziraphale’s neck, as they began to climb.  Aziraphale hadn’t thought of this when he’d redone the bedroom, hadn’t thought he could ever really have this.  If he’d let himself believe it, he’d have made the staircase wider; he’d have known he’d want to do it like this.  Or, even better, he’d have thought of Crowley carrying him up the stairs, happy and proud and bearing an angel away to their bower.</p><p>He shouldered the door open carefully, then stepped inside and gave Crowley a gentle squeeze.  Crowley lifted his head and looked around, fingers digging through linen and into Aziraphale’s flesh.</p><p>“I don’t understand.”</p><p>Aziraphale almost couldn’t close his throat against the laugh that wanted to escape.  Such a ridiculous statement, shot through as it was with frail hope and defensive denial.  It was a masterwork of absurdism, three words carved of emotion that could only exist because Crowley understood perfectly well.</p><p>“I want you to stay with me for as long as you’ll have me,” Aziraphale explained, utterly unnecessary and the most necessary thing in the world.  Invitations still needed to be sent, after all. “I’d have shown you yesterday, but I thought it might be a bit much.”</p><p>Crowley turned to look at him. “It’s for… us?”</p><p>“If you like,” Aziraphale said carefully.  He could sense the pitfall there, even if he couldn’t explain it.  He’d asked for so much over the years--this was something he didn’t want Crowley giving him as a favor.  If Crowley invited him to stay, if Crowley wanted it as much for them as it was for him, Aziraphale would have it be out of desire rather than gratitude or obligation. “It’s for you, either way.”</p><p>Crowley wriggled out of his arms, Aziraphale’s heart stopped halfway on its flight into his throat by Crowley reaching to take his hand without even looking back.  Such an unthinking, automatic gesture, Crowley’s fingers slotting into his and squeezing as he ventured deeper into the bedroom.  Aziraphale bit his lip, trying not to ask the million nervous questions clustering on his tongue, and Crowley tugged him along in his wake.</p><p>Aziraphale watched Crowley’s face as he inspected the plants, the wallpaper, the small paintings brightening up the space, the wardrobe with its rough guesses and wishful thinking about what Crowley might want in terms of pajamas.</p><p>“Bless it, angel,” Crowley sighed, hand stopping halfway to his face, fingers twisting at the arrested gesture.  Aziraphale couldn’t remember where his glasses had wound up, hadn’t seen them since Crowley had thrown himself into Aziraphale’s arms and not been able to let go.</p><p>“Does it… did I get it right?” Aziraphale asked.</p><p>Crowley closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, lips drawing together to hide a quiver, and Aziraphale pressed himself to Crowley’s back and tucked his face against the side of Crowley’s throat.  Right or wrong, he couldn’t bear to watch that mouth shape its answer.</p><p>“If you made it for me, it can’t be anything but,” Crowley managed eventually, all but the faintest trace of tears banished from his voice.  He reached over his shoulder, fingers digging into Aziraphale’s hair. “Fucking heaven, angel.”</p><p>“You’ll stay, then?” Aziraphale asked.  After last night, he needed to hear it as much as he’d needed to hear Crowley say he loved him.</p><p>Crowley sighed, a slow deflating thing that ended with him shrugging out of his jacket and kicking off his shoes and shepherding Aziraphale onto the bed ahead of him.  He clambered across the mattress after, pulled Aziraphale down against his chest, and stretched out alongside him.  A moment later, Crowley snapped his wings out, letting one tuck chastely along his back and the other curl decisively--covetously--around Aziraphale like a stiff, glossy comforter.</p><p>“Oh.” Aziraphale swallowed thickly, breath coming faster and heart fluttering like a sparrow’s wings.  He tilted his face up and kissed Crowley, his mouth barely grazing those wry lips before the demon growled and deepened it. “Oh, <i>Crowley</i>.”</p><p>“I just… I don’t want to hurt you,” Crowley grunted, angling his head back.  He took Aziraphale’s face in his hands and watched him, eyes searching. “I <i>won’t</i>, angel.”</p><p>“The only thing I can’t bear is you taking yourself off and leaving me alone,” Aziraphale told him, reaching up and taking his hands.  He’d break, if Crowley did that.  He was sure of it, now.  He’d been so stupidly confident in his own ability to walk away and live with it if the alternative was watching the world burn and Crowley turn his back on everything, and God, he’d come so close to carving out his own heart and feeding it to the carrion birds. “I can stand anything but that.”</p><p>He shivered in spite of the warmth of Crowley’s wing where it covered him, then ran the edge of his thumb over Crowley’s lips.</p><p>“If I rested, you’d stay with me, wouldn’t you?  I’d wake up still in your arms?” Aziraphale asked, his eyes focused on that too-truthful mouth.</p><p>Crowley hissed and nipped at his thumb, closing his eyes and wriggling closer. “Sleep as long as you like, angel.  I’m not going anywhere.”</p><p>“Swear it.”</p><p>“Satan himself couldn’t make me leave your side,” Crowley told him quietly. “Not then, not now, not tomorrow.  I swear, angel.”</p><p>Aziraphale kissed him hungrily, feeling tears prick at his eyes again.  The pair of them had been worn too thin; a lone angel and a solitary demon had never been meant to try carrying the weight of Armageddon on their shoulders.  When he let up this time, it was to tuck his face into the crook of Crowley’s neck and hold him close until exhaustion finally dragged him under, the warmth of the demon’s wing and the comforting smell of the demon’s skin the final permission he needed to let go and trust that he’d wake still loved and held.</p>
<hr/><p>Crowley let his arms go loose around Aziraphale’s corporation, wing heavy across the angel’s flesh.  Aziraphale asleep, and how long had it been since he’d seen that?  He closed his eyes, knowing exactly when he’d seen it last--that marvel of light and love pleasure-flushed and glowing in his arms and begging for a kiss--but still.  It felt like centuries.</p><p>Those soft blond curls framed Aziraphale’s peaceful face perfectly, and if the lines were etched a little deeper there at the moment, that was something he could spend the next few decades making up for, couldn’t he?  He hadn’t meant to.  It was only that he’d been too overwhelmed by the promise in Aziraphale’s little <i>touch me</i> to remember that he was a demon touching an angel, too entranced by that velvet-soft hair on fine-parchment skin, the way Aziraphale’s flesh quivered and swelled and tightened in response to him giving Aziraphale what he wanted.</p><p>Crowley had even thought the angel might be asking for more, might have gone to the effort of giving Crowley something to work with between his thighs, might want everything.  He’d blinded himself to the whole thing being too much, just as he’d suspected it would be when he’d had two brain cells to rub together.  He’d finally done it, hadn’t he--made Aziraphale cry with his wanting.</p><p>It had all been too much, and Crowley felt like a gourd that had been carved open and scraped out.  Aziraphale had been sobbing, great heaving heart-broken sobs that had sounded like they were coming from some deep recess in the core of his being with how they wrenched at him, and Crowley hadn’t known what to do, except that the first thing to do was to at least stop what he was doing.  He’d scrambled back, off, <i>away</i>, trying to take back all the hurt he’d caused, and Aziraphale had…</p><p>Crowley watched those delicate eyelids flutter and ran a light thumb over Aziraphale’s cheek, and the angel murmured, sounding pleased, and subsided.</p><p>Aziraphale had lunged after him, faster than he’d have given the angel credit for being able to move, and dragged Crowley back into his lap with the inarguable strength of a crocodile seizing a fawn.  He’d given up, then, hadn’t he?  Just given up and let the tide wash over him, out of anything remotely resembling an idea.  If touching was wrong and not-touching was wrong, then he could only do his best to thread the needle and ride it out, Aziraphale’s wracked, inarticulate crying almost worse than the howling wind of the void in his ears when he’d Fallen.  </p><p>He’d at least gotten to think that he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t transgressed so badly, during the Fall.  It had been unfair, he hadn’t deserved it, and God had been a right sodding bastard for doing it to him.  Aziraphale clutching at him and whimpering and babbling about Crowley touching him had been a one-demon show, his fucking <i>starring role</i>, nobody else’s fingerprints found at the scene of the crime.</p><p>The storm had blown over eventually, and still, Aziraphale hadn’t let go, had clung to him almost as hard as he’d clung to those murmured, disconsolate entreaties: I love you, I need you, don’t leave me.  His poor foolish angel, willing to suffer so much if only it called itself love, and this time it had been Crowley’s doing.  And Crowley had thought, what if it <i>was</i> possible, to have a do-over?  What if Aziraphale loving him meant the angel would give him another chance, and this time he wouldn’t grab, wouldn’t cry into Aziraphale’s cardigan like a blessed idiot, or drink too much, or tumble into Aziraphale’s lap, wouldn’t lose his head and touch too much or too quickly or… or… or whatever the fuck it was he’d done to make Aziraphale weep.</p><p>Instead Aziraphale had been apologizing to him, and asking his forgiveness, and wanting to kiss him, and it had made a certain amount of sense, at least filtered through the brain-shaped bruise sitting in his skull like an oversized pudding, that it had been as much of a fit as Crowley’s own earlier outburst.  He’d wanted it to be true, too, needed it to be something he hadn’t really done, something that they could work past after they’d recuperated from, well, the end of the world.  He’d needed Aziraphale’s confession of love to be something besides one more wound racked up because the angel didn’t think he deserved better, because the angel was too used to affection coming at a steep price.</p><p>And then Aziraphale had picked him up as easily as he’d collect a mislaid book and carried him upstairs.  It might have been one thing if Crowley’d had the wherewithal to form an expectation as to what it was Aziraphale might want to show him, if there’d been even the smallest drop of energy left for speculation or worry or fear.  He hadn’t, and so he’d looked around the bedroom and thought, <i>Ah.  Hallucinating again.  Of course.</i></p><p>He’d split himself down the center, half of him looking around and coming to the inescapable conclusion that Aziraphale had taken a great deal of time and a great many pains to carve out this space in his private, inviolable dimense for Crowley and the other half reminding the first half that it was a self-deluding wanker about to embarrass the heaven out of both of them with that assumption.</p><p>Every last inch of it had been one more chink found in his armor, one more soft, exposed spot he’d hoped no one had noticed.  That innocent smile and those blushing cheeks made it so blessed easy to forget that those bright blue eyes didn’t miss much--took in everything, in point of fact--and it was only Aziraphale’s better nature that kept him from coming to this or that unflattering conclusion.  It was hopeless optimism, not obtuseness, that kept Aziraphale’s blinders on.  The angel had been paying more attention than Crowley had understood, had bent that formidable intellect to the question of what Crowley might find appealing in a space, and he’d struck true.</p><p>If Crowley had designed a space for the angel, it would have been a magpie’s gallery unimaginatively stuffed full of things Aziraphale had admired but made himself leave behind.  Given the same task, Aziraphale hadn’t needed to see Crowley admire anything specific--he’d been able to look on it and know that Crowley <i>would</i>.  Had it really been so obvious that Crowley preferred sun-dappled seascapes and plein air mountainsides?  Had the angel had to rub it in quite so much, the way he knew Crowley to the core?</p><p>It had been the same with the rug--the pile had been just right, the color bright without being overwhelming--and the chairs, and the bed, and the bookshelf full of the exact sort of books he’d read over and over again and still claim full-on illiteracy if Aziraphale ever caught him so much as glancing at them.  The wardrobe had been the icing on the cake, though--the cherry on top, the single flaming wheel rolling away after the car crash going on in what was left of his brain.</p><p>Aziraphale knew blessed well that Crowley had never bought a stitch of clothing in his eternal blessed life, just miracled it into existence when he wanted it and banished it back to the ether when he didn’t, and still, there was a wardrobe precisely half full of extremely comfortable-looking pajamas.  All of them had been in Crowley’s favored color scheme, rich blacks and charcoal grays, a fleck of red here or silver there for contrast, and leavening the whole lot was tartan.  <i>Aziraphale’s</i> tartan.  It had been a gift within a gift, an unmistakable message, clear as a tag on a wrapped box under a Christmas tree: to Crowley, love Aziraphale.</p><p>And then had come that timid, needy question--that half-fearful <i>“Did I get it right?”</i>--and it had not been the most comfortable thing in the world to realize that it could have been a sofa that was just his, a broken-down armchair kept because he approved of it, a fucking glorified habitrail if that’s what the angel had taken it into his head to think Crowley might want.  Crowley would have taken it and gladly because it meant that Aziraphale was not just asking him to stay now, in a fit of panic, but that Aziraphale had wanted to ask him before any of it.  </p><p>It was real, and it was a decision Aziraphale had come to in his own time, in his own way, with nobody pestering or wheedling him into it.  He’d taken care over laying it out, and decorating it, and filling it with things he’d hoped would find favor.  Even the plants were species Crowley had tutted over affectionately, barely refraining from ruffling Aziraphale’s hair at his desire for them, and said, “They’d be grand in the shop, angel, but you’d never keep them alive without cheating.”</p><p>Crowley managed a wan smile at that.  Here they were, verdant and happy and stuffed from rootlet to anther with ethereal charm.  If the angel dozing in his arms was above cheating, the shop’s hours wouldn’t need a flowchart to decipher.  The angel dozing in his arms, in the bed he’d set aside for Crowley in the one tiny patch of Earth he’d had to call his own.  The angel dozing in his arms, who’d been spread thin and hurting and still made Crowley swear not to leave before he’d surrendered to sleep, as if Crowley could bear to leave him alone, abandon him while he was vulnerable, deal another blow on top of the hurt he’d already caused.</p><p>He cradled Aziraphale closer, kissed his cheek, and held him fast, too tired and empty to do anything else.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Aziraphale blinked awake, warm and loose-limbed and desperate for a cup of tea.  He stretched and sighed, the bed soft under him, then stopped cold and stared up at the ceiling.  Slowly, carefully, he sat up and looked to his left, tugging the blankets down slightly over the unresponsive lump that could as easily be pillows as a demon.  Crowley had promised.  Crowley had <i>sworn</i>.</p><p>The comforter peeled away to reveal a shock of red hair and a handsome face, slack with sleep and mashed awkwardly into a paperback.  Aziraphale’s hand went to his mouth, instinctively covering the fond smile he couldn’t help breaking into.  It was one of the books off the shelf--<i>Women’s Barracks</i>, Aziraphale thought--and the ridiculous serpent was more than halfway through it.</p><p>Then Crowley stirred in his sleep, rolling over onto his side, and the smile slipped from Aziraphale’s lips.  Crowley had changed while Aziraphale had slept.  Gone were the tight jeans, the clinging shirt.  Aziraphale folded the cover back just a little farther, heart tight in his chest.  Crowley had picked the black flannel set with the red piping and the tartan lining, the wide collar half turned up with his wriggling about to show the tartan underfold.  Aziraphale had hoped, when he’d added them to the wardrobe.  He had hoped, but he hadn’t let himself really believe.</p><p>Crowley shimmied back under the blanket, hand reaching for the edge of the cover and finding Aziraphale’s fingers instead.  There was a brief moment, that casual touch that Aziraphale could only want more of, and then Crowley flopped onto his back and looked at Aziraphale, eyes bleary and unfocused.</p><p>“Had to wake up sometime, I guess,” he said, yawning and stretching, one hand closing the book and shoving it under the pillows as smoothly as any stage magician.  Aziraphale could break his heart with how beautiful Crowley looked like this.</p><p>“Mmm.” Aziraphale reached over and brushed a few stray strands of hair from Crowley’s brow. “Was I asleep so very long?”</p><p>“Going on a fortnight, angel,” Crowley told him, rolling his shoulders. “Feeling better?”</p><p>“A fortnight!” Aziraphale stared at him.</p><p>“Twelve days, if you want to get specific.” Crowley sat up and crossed his arms over his knees, eyes searching Aziraphale’s face.</p><p>Aziraphale opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again.  It wasn’t like they’d had anything on, and if he’d slept that long, he’d probably needed it. “Thank you, for staying.”</p><p>“The hardships I endure for you, angel,” Crowley snorted. “Sharing a soft bed with Heaven’s most wayward beauty.”</p><p>Aziraphale flushed scarlet, then realized that there was precious little stopping him from leaning over and kissing the demon, if Crowley had gotten enough equilibrium back that he could tease him like that.  Aziraphale moved slowly enough that Crowley could protest, if he was going to.  He didn’t, and Aziraphale couldn’t help the little noise that escaped him when thin, soft lips parted under his.</p><p>“You look utterly delectable right now, my dear,” he murmured, fingers trailing over the soft cloth covering Crowley’s arm.</p><p>Crowley hummed and took Aziraphale’s hand, then lifted it to his lips to press a kiss like falling leaves to the back of it. “There’s no hurry, angel.”</p><p>Aziraphale flushed for a different reason and licked his lips. “I am sorry, about before.  I promise I feel a great deal less… fragile than I did.”</p><p>“You don’t have to be sorry, I just don’t want to go upsetting you again,” Crowley said, moving on to kiss his knuckles.  </p><p>Aziraphale shivered at it, at the dry brush of tender skin against tender skin, at the adoring, beatific focus Crowley brought to the task.  He remembered what it felt like to have Crowley in his lap, writhing and panting and clutching at him like a drowning man with a life preserver, Crowley wanting him so badly that it had transformed into need. “Are you?  Feeling better, I mean.”</p><p>“I spent three straight days with you fussing and threatening to wake up every time I moved my wing or rolled over or had a cup of coffee and playing the proper clinging vine afterward,” Crowley chuckled, shaking his head.  There was a ruefulness to his smile. “Every blessed time I moved, you reached for me.  And every time, you…” He looked away and took a breath. “You looked so peaceful, every time you found me.  So happy.”</p><p>“Oh, my dear.” Aziraphale scooted closer and leaned against him, dropping his cheek to rest on Crowley’s shoulder.  There was a warm, wonderful give to the demon’s flesh, with nothing between them but the pajamas Aziraphale had made for him.  The pajamas he’d accepted from Aziraphale, dressed himself in of his own accord. “I wasn’t joking before.  What I said about losing you, I mean.  I couldn’t bear it if I lost you, and even if I didn’t like admitting it, I knew it.  It’s terrible, living with such a weakness.”</p><p>“You don’t say,” Crowley said, tilting his head.  </p><p>Aziraphale scoffed and squeezed his hand.  Before the portal--maybe even before Crowley’s breakdown after the Ritz--he’d have tried arguing his case, telling Crowley that he’d never had anything to worry about, that Aziraphale always played it safe when he wasn’t tempted out of his natural inclinations by a demon’s wiles.  He’d probably have said something very cruel without meaning to.</p><p>“I was <i>trying</i>, Crowley.  With you, sometimes it felt like you never saw a bit of danger you didn’t want to fling yourself at headlong.  It almost felt like an urge toward self-destruction.” He closed his eyes and tried not to think about that interminable nap in the 1800s, how it had felt like a foretaste of some horror to come. “Sometimes you wouldn’t even let me patch you up properly afterwards, and it was so hard to let go of you when I didn’t know if you’d come back.”</p><p>“You could have asked me to,” Crowley pointed out gently, running his thumb over the back of Aziraphale’s hand. “Goes a long way, actually asking.”</p><p>“I… I did try, my dear.  Not very well, most times, and maybe not in the way you always wanted to hear, but it’s a hard thing, when you know the answer will probably be no.” Aziraphale blinked back tears. “And I’m sorry, about--well, about asking you to try, ah.  Asking for forgiveness.  When we argued.”</p><p>How deep a wound must that have been to Crowley’s pride?  He’d always had too damn much of it, and when Crowley had thrown all his cards on the table and tried to tell him that Crowley thought he was more important than the rest of creation combined, Aziraphale had stood there and reminded him of all the ways he’d been cosmically judged as unfit and unwanted and unclean.  Aziraphale had not only denied him, but, read uncharitably, suggested that the only way he’d accept Crowley was if he somehow found a way to be something better.  </p><p>It had seemed so damned important at the time, that Crowley try.  It had felt like a betrayal, that Crowley hadn’t been willing to make the attempt, that Crowley had been willing to walk away from him forever rather than even asking to come back to the fold.  Crowley had doubtless felt the same way with Aziraphale offering himself, but only if Crowley could be purified first.</p><p>“I--” Crowley hissed softly. “I suppose I can’t blame you for throwing that one out there, if I was ready to pack up and head for another fucking solar system.”</p><p>“I was frightened, and I was so sure there was no fighting it.” Aziraphale laughed nervously, an ache like the oldest bruise on a rotting apple making his heart tighten. “And I was so angry, that you wouldn’t even try.  I should have had more faith.”</p><p>“There wasn’t much point, angel,” Crowley sighed, and Aziraphale could feel Crowley’s jaw setting, that bulge of muscle and flex of bone pressing into Aziraphale’s hair. “I did ask.  I begged, and pleaded, and I was so, so sorry for whatever the blessed fuck it was that I’d done that was so awful.  I’d have crawled all the way back on my hands and knees, spent the rest of eternity grovelling, if only She’d let me come home again.”</p><p>Aziraphale couldn’t help a small noise at that, and Crowley shushed him with a sharp, decisive kiss to his temple and whipcord sinew arms winding around his shoulders.</p><p>“None of that, angel.  It was a long time ago.” Crowley hugged him tighter, restless fingers rubbing small circles into the flesh of Aziraphale’s arms. “But I meant it then, was the thing.  I meant it as much as anyone could mean anything, and if it didn’t work when I meant it, it didn’t stand a bleeding chance of working when the only thing I wanted to tell Her was to take the Great Plan and ram it right up the nearest black hole as far as She could stick it.  And it was, er.  You know.  Heat of the moment and all.  A little bit of a <i>thing</i>, you dancing around it like maybe I’d just been too thick to think of it before.  Felt a bit like I was losing my mind, or you were having a go at me for kicks.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t!” Aziraphale protested, straightening up, and Crowley kissed him again.</p><p>“I know!  I know.” Crowley’s smile was tired, the edges of it flattened out and thin. “It was just the whole thing was like something out of a nightmare.  None of it made sense, but I couldn’t find a way to pull out of the dive.  Like, everything we’d been through together, and we were really spending what could be our last day on Earth screaming at each other?”</p><p>“I didn’t mean to,” Aziraphale said.  He <i>hadn’t</i>.  He just… hadn’t not meant to, exactly, either.  He hadn’t wanted to fall, hadn’t wanted to fail, hadn’t wanted to give up his place as an angel or his favor with a demon.  He’d had to pick, finally, and he’d convinced himself that he was incapable of choosing, that he could only do as he was bid.  If he could say no, now, at the end of everything, would that mean he’d said yes, before, to every other horrible thing he’d stood by and watched happen?</p><p>“I know.” Crowley’s arms slipped down to circle his waist, and Crowley let his cheek rest on Aziraphale’s shoulder again. “Went a long way to convincing me, you clinging to me for twelve days.”</p><p>Aziraphale blushed.  Almost two weeks, and he didn’t really remember any of it.  But then, he supposed he didn’t need to remember the finer details if he remembered the sense of contentment and safety that had settled over him almost as soon as he’d closed his eyes and let go.  Crowley’s wing had been heavy and warm, and the way it had curled around him had felt like forgiveness.  It had been a quiet, restorative sort of bliss, a glimmer of what he’d felt that time Crowley had laid him down on the couch and coaxed him into a climax he’d been feeling for days afterward.</p><p>A hot flicker of longing ran along his skin.  He’d wanted more so badly, after Crowley had done that.  He’d wanted more so badly, and he’d been so close to asking so many times.  He’d come up with so many excuses, starting with being unclear on technique and asking Crowley to demonstrate and ending with an appeal to simple, tit-for-tat fairness.  </p><p>It had all come to naught when he’d stopped daydreaming and remembered his place.  Crowley’s appetites were fathomless.  He couldn’t help being what he was, but Aziraphale would be naive at best to forget it.  Putting himself in a position where he’d let--<i>encourage</i>--Crowley to take whatever he wanted would only ruin them both.  He indulged Crowley’s hedonism too much already, and he hadn’t needed any further signs or portents to remind him of the potential consequences.  No, a single demon masquerading as an angel had been more than enough.  But so long as Aziraphale had kept his own head, there’d been no reason not to lavish Crowley with as much pleasure as the demon wanted, was there?</p><p>Too bad Crowley had eventually tired of it.  It had been wonderful, having Crowley heavy and placid in his arms, affectionate and open and so very beautiful.  Those golden eyes had been practically glowing with happiness, that brilliant face relaxed and at peace.  Aziraphale had been able to imagine him as entirely an angel in those moments, gentle and curious and eager to be pleased.  Even now as a demon, Crowley was bitter and sharp-edged and desperate, but he wasn’t vicious.  He wasn’t <i>cruel</i>.</p><p>Aziraphale reached up and stroked Crowley’s hair.  He hadn’t properly understood what demons were like, before he’d seen Hell.  It had been different, in the thick of battle.  They hadn’t been so very different from the faithful servants, before the Fall.  Certainly no one had been having prolonged conversations about what they wanted, or the philosophical underpinnings of revenge, or the numerous slights and grudges that had led up to it.  He’d just blindly trusted Heaven’s intelligence, afterwards, and the archangels had spouted off a lot of… what?  Supposition?  Wishful thinking?  Projection?  </p><p>He’d have thought Michael had the most experience with demons, outside of himself, but then when they’d shown up with the holy water, they’d seemed almost uncertain.  Unsure of themself.  Uriel had made assumptions to his face that even the most cursory of contact with properly, well, <i>demonic</i> demons should have preempted.  Wherever the archangels had gotten their information, Aziraphale had tempered it with what he’d seen of Crowley and come to an even more wildly misguided idea of Hell.  He’d certainly never thought to hear Metatron’s prim, polished blood-thirst echoed in a Prince’s gloating sneer, see Gabriel’s pompous anger reflected in a Duke’s seething triumph.</p><p>Frightened and furious and lashing out, no one with any real idea of what was going on and no one willing to admit it, always on the look-out for anyone weaker on whom they could take it out to make themselves feel more powerful again… That had been the worst part about Hell itself, hadn’t it?  How familiar it had felt, once he’d gotten used to the trappings.</p><p>Aziraphale’s fingers twisted in Crowley’s hair.  Crowley had never belonged there.  Aziraphale hadn’t really belonged in Heaven, either, but God help him, how he’d tried to.  He’d believed in everything as hard as he’d been able, and then when that hadn’t worked he’d told himself he just had to believe harder.  Crowley at least had been brave enough to flout Hell’s demands whenever he could.  Aziraphale tried to imagine Crowley spouting Hell’s party line the way Aziraphale had always clung to Heaven’s and couldn’t help the startled laugh that escaped him.</p><p>“Mmm?” Crowley straightened up a smidge, lifting his cheek from Aziraphale’s shoulder and looking at him with half a question in his eyes.</p><p>“Sorry.  I was just…” Aziraphale shook his head slowly. “You know, all the things I’ve said over the years that I’d basically gotten lock, stock, and barrel from the first choir, that you made fun of all the time?”</p><p>“I only made fun of them insofar as they’re utterly ridiculous,” Crowley assured him.  Aziraphale let his lips quirk at that.</p><p>“I was trying to imagine you pulling anything half so stupid, and it was… utterly ridiculous,” Aziraphale finished.  He scoffed softly, almost to himself.  It wasn’t even down to demons being naturally terse.  There’d been no shortage of speeches in Hell, no lack of accusing demons playing to their audience and giving into their more bombastic urges and preening poisonously in the limelight.  If Crowley had wanted to ape their rationale and quote them at length, there’d certainly been more than enough to choose from. “I couldn’t.  You’ve always known better.”</p><p>“Not as hard to let go of the security blanket when it’s covered in filth, inexplicably damp, and full of holes,” Crowley told him, cocking his head. “You’re really going to have a go at blaming yourself over this, aren’t you?” He caught Aziraphale’s chin when he tried to look away, touch light but irresistible as Crowley turned his face back so that he was looking into Crowley’s eyes again. “What happened when you stepped out of line, hmm?”</p><p>“I saved you.” Aziraphale swallowed the startled laugh that fluttered in his lungs at Crowley’s expression. “I freed you from a place you hated, from people who hated you but were too jealous to ever let you go, who’d have seen you dead before they let you leave.” He licked his lips and tried to steady himself, wishing Crowley would hold him tighter and wrap his dark wings around them. “When I finally found the courage to step out of line, and tell them it was rubbish, I saved everything.  And if I’d done it sooner--”</p><p>“You’d have been dead and gone and not here to do it when it needed doing,” Crowley interrupted, pulling Aziraphale against his chest.  He kissed Aziraphale’s hair and snorted. “Probably taken me along with you, what with nobody around to keep me from running my mouth so much, and then that’s both of us off the board.  All part of the Ineffable Plan, you waiting for the right moment, I’m sure.”</p><p>“Don’t make fun.” It was a habitual thing, scolding Crowley.  He wasn’t mocking, though, Aziraphale was suddenly certain.  Crowley trusted him, trusted in the part Aziraphale had played in the terrible drama they’d been swept up in.  Strange, how that made it hurt more--the demon who’d never really lost his faith while the angel had seized on any excuse to doubt.</p><p>“Mmm.” He kissed Aziraphale’s temple, then let go entirely and made to wriggle out of bed. “Let me get you a cup of tea, angel.”</p><p>“Stay,” Aziraphale said, seizing Crowley’s hand.  Crowley’s eyebrows rose, his face going soft and sad in equal measure, and Aziraphale laced their fingers together so he didn’t have to see that look directed at him.  Crowley loved him.  Crowley loved him, and Crowley had been feeding that love in secret and at great personal risk for such a long time, and it made him feel like a mouse caught out in the open, dangerously vulnerable in the face of something that could strike without warning or mercy. “I only… I don’t want a cup of tea, if it means you leave to go fetch it.”</p><p>Aziraphale was half-desperate for a cup of tea, but the idea that it would cost watching Crowley walk away wasn’t to be borne.</p><p>“We can’t stay in bed forever,” Crowley told him, and Aziraphale had a momentary, overwhelming impulse to ask why not.  </p><p>He kissed Crowley instead of asking such a ludicrous question, leaned forward and drove his tongue into Crowley’s mouth instead of telling the demon they most certainly could.  Crowley let him, let his jaw got soft, reached up to cradle the back of Aziraphale’s head.  When Aziraphale wrapped his arms around Crowley’s chest, the soft fabric of the pajamas he’d made for Crowley slid over his skin, deliciously warm with the heat of Crowley’s body and loose enough that it was nothing at all to slide his hands under the hem and up, up, over Crowley’s spine and ribs, over skin fine as satin and perfect against his fingers.</p><p>Crowley shivered at that, arching and kissing him back with a sharp and sudden hunger, and Aziraphale didn’t think he could be blamed for wanting to stay in bed forever.  Just so long as Crowley was in it with him.</p><p>“Crowley?” Aziraphale murmured, leaning back and delighting in the way the demon followed him, sucking at his bottom lip and kissing his cheek when Aziraphale had to turn to get the word out around it all.</p><p>“Mmm?” Crowley grunted, kissing his way up Aziraphale’s cheekbone to his hairline.</p><p>Aziraphale laughed and squirmed, surprised at how it tickled. “Let me see your wings?”</p><p>“Really?” Crowley asked, leaning back and examining Aziraphale’s face. “Anything you like, and that’s what you want?”</p><p>“Why shouldn’t I?” Aziraphale countered, letting his lips purse into a pout. “They’re beautiful.”</p><p>Crowley gave him a look that said the demon clearly thought he’d taken a blow to the head, but he wriggled back and freed himself from the covers. “So long as I’m at it...”</p><p>He passed Aziraphale the cup of tea suddenly in his hands, and Aziraphale couldn’t help the little shiver of anticipation that ran through him.  Crowley was too good to him, sometimes.  He closed his eyes and breathed in the aroma of the London fog Crowley had miracled up for him.  The rustle of feathers and the displacement of air made him open them again, eager to see Crowley’s lovely feathers against the backdrop of the room he’d made for the demon.</p><p>“Oh.” Aziraphale couldn’t help the smile that blossomed on his face, couldn’t help the way his hands tightened against the china.  Crowley’s lustrous black feathers were as magnificent as always, glossy and regal and perfect.  He reached out and ran his fingertips along the edge of the one closest, wishing he’d had more excuses to touch them over the years. “You’ve always taken such wonderful care of them, my dear.  You can’t think I’m any less sensible of how perfect they are than you’ve been.”</p><p>“Wrong way ‘round, angel,” Crowley murmured, his eyes tracking the progress of Aziraphale’s fingers as if he doubted what they were seeing. “You can let yours get as out of hand as you like, no one’s going to mistake them for anything less than divinely inspired.  These things get a bit messy, I might as well chuck it in and make with the rest of the corruption to boot.”</p><p>“Nonsense,” Aziraphale said, clicking his tongue.  He looked up through his lashes and bit his lip, and a thrill ran through him at how wide Crowley’s pupils went as they focused on his mouth. “Wrap them around me?”</p><p>Crowley stretched slightly, then curled them loose around the two of them.  Aziraphale sipped the tea and basked in the heat radiating from those perfect wings.  They smelled of Crowley’s cologne and Crowley’s skin along with the slight hint of burnt matches, and Aziraphale wanted to bury his face in them.  He reached out and took Crowley’s hand instead, squeezing it and scooting a little closer so that their knees were touching.</p><p>“Thank you, Crowley.” He pulled Crowley’s hand up to rest the back of it against his cheek.</p><p>“Bless it, angel,” Crowley whispered, and Aziraphale smiled back at that beloved face with its helplessly adoring expression.  So much love was in Crowley’s eyes that the demon looked almost lost with it, and how had he ever thought Crowley couldn’t love him?  How had he ever thought he’d have to settle for what Crowley could manage, a crude facsimile of the genuine article?  Credulous, that’s what he’d been.  Too simple to question what his superiors had told him, too afraid to ask Crowley if it was really true, too ready to take the skim when there was no reason not to have the cream.  But still, what he’d let himself have had been sweet.</p><p>He trailed his fingers gently across Crowley’s flight feathers, marveling at the glossy irridescence of them. “You know, for all the hardship and strain of the past decade, I couldn’t entirely regret it when it let me see you every day.”</p><p>Crowley blinked at him, lips parting, and Aziraphale smiled quietly.  He’d managed to surprise the demon, again--it would seem he was making up for lost time.</p><p>“It was such a comfort,” Aziraphale continued, tracing the path of one rachis with his nail, then coming back with his fingertips and smoothing down the barbs. “I know we were too busy--and too closely observed--to risk much in the way of meeting, but just knowing that you were safe and sound and close at hand… It made me wish we’d found a way to take rooms right across the street from one another centuries ago.” He brought Crowley’s knuckles to his lips and kissed them. “Not to mention how marvelous you looked in those smart frocks of yours.”</p><p>Crowley made an inarticulate noise at that, and Aziraphale let him go and sipped his tea.</p><p>“Thank you,” Aziraphale said after a moment, quietly, “for staying with me.”</p><p>Crowley glanced around the room and rubbed his eyes. “Hardly a burden--”</p><p>“I meant through all of it,” Aziraphale said, shaking his head.  He’d given Crowley so many chances, so many reasons, to walk away over the years, and it wasn’t as if it had been love keeping him around in the beginning.  Of course, even when it had been love, Crowley had still been able to say no to things, to say <i>thanks but no thanks</i> when Aziraphale asked him to be careful or to keep a low profile or to let Aziraphale hold him through a bout of ecstasy.  Even when it had been love, Crowley had been choosing to stay, to help, to keep loving. “When I called you a foul fiend and told you that you went too fast for me and accused you of working with the Nazis and, ah, whatever it was that soured the ecstatic episodes for you.  I know I didn’t exactly make it easy for you, sometimes.”</p><p>“You didn’t, no.” Crowley let his wings curl tighter around Aziraphale’s back, and Aziraphale couldn’t help running his fingers through the coverts.  Crowley’s eyes went molten and his cheeks went pink at that, and Aziraphale did it again. “Stop that--I’m trying to concentrate, here.”</p><p>“Mmm.” Aziraphale brushed his lips over the joint of Crowley’s wing, the ghost of a kiss over the blade, impossible for Crowley to have felt through his feathers.  Crowley blushed furiously anyway.  Aziraphale watched the color spread over that handsome face, drinking it in.  He should be careful, shouldn’t he?  Not too much, not too fast, save something for later.  Crowley could get bored so quickly with even the most potent of pleasures.</p><p>“You’re not making this easy, either,” Crowley grumbled.  He dug his fingers into the blankets and hissed. “It’s just that not staying was bloody impossible, angel.  The hardest day with you was better than the easiest day on my own.  And it wasn’t you souring anything for me.  It was just… Do you know how fucking hard it was to go from curled up in your lap, almost asleep with my head on your shoulder and you…” Crowley swallowed, and Aziraphale watched him, heart in his throat. “...and you focusing on me like that, you acting like you <i>loved</i> me, to back on the street, alone, heading away from you and trying to pretend it was fine?  How hard it was to go from that to ‘oh, look at the time, best get yourself home, early day tomorrow’ and get sent packing?”</p><p>“I didn’t mean it like that,” Aziraphale said softly.  Oh, but he hadn’t.  It had been so hard to let Crowley go afterwards, but he’d known it wasn’t possible to keep him, known that Crowley wouldn’t stay, wouldn’t let him have more.  He’d never in all of eternity thought that he could have more if only he asked.</p><p>“I know you didn’t.” Crowley ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back out of his face. “It didn’t make it any easier to manage, though.  I couldn’t keep doing it, angel, that’s all--I wanted too much, and it let me think I could have it, and then I never got it.” A washed-out smile tugged at the corner of his lips, wreathed with the shadow of an old pain made fresh again. “The high wasn’t worth the kick.”</p><p>“Oh, Crowley.” Aziraphale set the teacup aside and took Crowley’s hands in his own. “Let me make it up to you?”</p><p>Crowley looked around the bedroom, his wings tightening against Aziraphale’s back and his fingers tightening around Aziraphale’s hands. “Pretty sure you’ve already done, angel.”</p><p>“No, I…” Aziraphale tried to keep the flush creeping up his face from going too dark. “I mean, let me make it up to you.” He tugged at a few nerves and nudged a few more hormones into being--just enough to make Crowley’s eyes widen. “No leaving, this time.  You don’t ever have to go away again, if you don’t want.  Just you, here, in my arms, with me loving you.”</p><p>Crowley licked his lips, his eyes darting from Aziraphale’s to their joined hands to the rest of the bedroom. “Hnn.  Fuck’s sake, angel.”</p><p>“Please,” Aziraphale said, letting his thumbs stroke over the back of Crowley’s hands.</p><p>Crowley’s cheeks were scarlet when he tossed his head and glanced back at Aziraphale. “Gimme a minute, then.”</p><p>“Or, you could leave your corporation as it is?” Aziraphale asked hopefully.  He’d always wondered if that would make it better, if Crowley might go even warmer and looser in his arms, if Crowley might finally let Aziraphale kiss him while he was lost in the throes of it.</p><p>Crowley flicked out his tongue, blank surprise opening his face in a way Aziraphale hadn’t seen as many times in the last century as he’d seen in the past hour.  Then Crowley was shaking his head and letting out a long, slow breath.</p><p>“Let’s give that one a bit, why don’t we?  Just, you know…” He reached up and scrubbed at his face. “Not ruin the moment quite yet.”</p><p>“It’s not going to ruin anything,” Aziraphale assured him, leaning forward to kiss him gently. “Crowley, I know you.  I love you.  There’s nothing of yourself that you can show me that will make you any less <i>you</i>, or any less loved.”</p><p>The white disappeared from Crowley’s eyes, and he hissed and looked away, eyes on anything but Aziraphale’s face even as his wings blazed hot against Aziraphale’s back.  Aziraphale reached up and cupped the demon’s cheek, wishing those feathers were flush against his skin, not even the linen of his shirt separating them.  The idea of them making it so far only for Crowley to still hold back, to still shy away from him, was maddening.</p><p>“But of course we’ll wait, if you want.” As long as it took, as long as he needed--Crowley was worth it.  Still, there were things they could have now, weren’t there? Aziraphale smiled gently. “My dear, would you mind terribly if I, ah, took off my shirt?”</p><p>“’course I wouldn’t!” Crowley shook his head, his lips quirking like he was biting back a suggestion, or a request.</p><p>“Or… you could do it for me?” Aziraphale offered, shivering slightly in spite of the warmth pouring off Crowley.  He’d only gotten such a brief moment of Crowley’s hands on his flesh, nimble fingers skimming tenderly across his skin, before he’d gone and scotched the whole thing by breaking down over it.</p><p>Crowley hissed softly, face twitching like he’d been cornered but hands already reaching for Aziraphale’s buttons. </p><p>“You’re sure?” he asked, fingertips closing around the fabric, the edge of his thumb resting on the mother-of-pearl.</p><p>“Please, Crowley.” Aziraphale stroked the backs of his wrists and smiled at him, trying to put permission and encouragement and a desperate, wanton plea into it all at once.</p><p>Crowley swallowed and set to work, unfastening buttons one after the other, then easing the shirt off Aziraphale’s shoulders.  Aziraphale gasped at the feel of feathers on his skin, that wicked, silken heat dancing over his flesh, and Crowley stopped short, staring at him.</p><p>“Oh, your wings are so warm,” Aziraphale murmured, tugging him a little farther along.  It was almost a shame he couldn’t use grace on the demon--he was sure he could apply it with the same careful delicacy he’d been able to master when it was just hormones and nerves--but it wasn’t as if he’d ever gotten any complaints from Crowley about the quality of the ecstatic episodes.</p><p>“That’s cheating, angel,” Crowley growled, wrapping his wings tighter around Aziraphale’s back. “You can’t flatter me and hit me with an extra dose or two at the same time.”</p><p>“Whyever not?” Aziraphale asked, shuddering.  He wanted to press his face into Crowley’s feathers, dig his fingers into those warm coverts, pull them around himself while Crowley mounted him--</p><p>He blushed furiously and looked down, and oh, how wonderful Crowley’s long legs looked, sheathed in the pajamas Aziraphale had made for him and half-tangled with his own.</p><p>“Kiss me, Crowley,” he said, looking back up only to find the demon wide-eyed and half panicked. “Please? It’s only that I want you to so… so badly.  And I couldn’t ever tell you, before, or do anything about it, and--”</p><p>Crowley cut him off with a kiss, open-mouthed and famished and unrestrained, a far cry from the quiet, borderline-chaste things Aziraphale had been trying to confine himself to since his outburst on the sofa.  Long, slender fingers tangled in his hair even as a long, slender tongue flicked against his, testing before Crowley deepened the kiss and practically hauled him into his lap.  He scrambled to keep up with it, fitting his thighs over Crowley’s and wrapping his arms around that narrow waist to steady himself, letting his own hands go tight and possessive when they rose to curl into that red hair.  And under it all, as if there had been no lamented break in their lessons, he played a gentle but insistent melody on the demon’s corporation, throwing fuel on pleasure’s fire.</p><p>Crowley’s cock, unbanished, was thick and insistent where it tented his pants, and Aziraphale wanted to slip his hand under the soft waistband and take it in hand.  Instead he wriggled closer, pressing himself tight against Crowley, belly to belly and chest to chest, thighs tight around the demon’s hips.</p><p>“Love you, angel--” Crowley muttered, kissing his way down Aziraphale’s neck, blandishments broken into snatched phrases when half of them were licked into Aziraphale’s skin. “--blessed beautiful, never wanted anything so much as I’ve wanted you.”</p><p>“Then hold me close, darling,” Aziraphale told him, shivering as feathers stroked over his spine and down his ribs. “Oh, Crowley, I love you!”</p><p>Crowley clutched at him and buried his face in Aziraphale’s hair, groaning softly as Aziraphale drew him further toward the peak, carefully ramping up the threads of power drawn tight through Crowley’s nerves.  His feathers were silky and blood-warm against Aziraphale’s skin, mouth open and wet against Aziraphale’s shoulder, and he seemed to want nothing more than to hold Aziraphale to him.</p><p>“Angel, <i>please</i>,” he panted, fingers digging into Aziraphale’s back and thighs flexing under Aziraphale’s hips as Crowley’s whole corporation cried out for release.</p><p>“Stay with me,” Aziraphale sighed, burrowing his hands under Crowley’s shirt and raking his nails down Crowley’s back. “Stay with me always, darling, let me hold you, I love you so much, I never want to let you go.”</p><p>Crowley arched against him, keening, and Aziraphale couldn’t tell what was ecstasy and what was his words and what was his nails on Crowley’s skin.  He let his grip on the demon go tight, immovable and unshakeable, no power on Earth capable of prying Crowley from his arms.</p><p>“My dear, I love you,” he murmured, whispering the words against the soft lobe of Crowley’s ear as he kissed him.  Aziraphale couldn’t resist the impulse to draw it out, to give Crowley another few bursts of pleasure, warm and gentle waves of it rocking through him after the shattering first climax.  Crowley shook in his arms, squirming and whimpering, and Aziraphale kissed him, kissed him hard enough to make up for every time he hadn’t dared before.</p><p>Crowley eventually went still and quiet, the tremor in his limbs subsiding, and Aziraphale marveled at how wonderful it was to finally have him like this.  Aziraphale breathed him in, the scent of Crowley’s skin as heavy on Aziraphale’s tongue as the weight of the demon in his arms, those blood-warm wings against his back making him long for a release of his own.</p><p>“Lie down with me, angel,” Crowley said, voice thick and burred, pleading as if Aziraphale could deny him anything in that moment. “Lie down with me, let me…”</p><p>His hands went soft and caressing, stroking over Aziraphale’s bare skin, and Aziraphale shivered at it.  Crowley’s eyes were an endless pool of molten gold and night, pupils almost entirely round, and the flush on his cheeks was like a rose in the height of its bloom.</p><p>“Crowley, darling…” Aziraphale couldn’t help the peal of laughter when Crowley nuzzled at his throat, tickling him.  He let Crowley press him down to the mattress, lamenting only the loss of those wings on him.  Crowley sucked at his throat, fingers in his hair, running over his flesh, then kissed his way down Aziraphale’s chest and belly.</p><p>It was only when Crowley’s hands paused at his belt that Aziraphale recalled himself.</p><p>“Ah, I haven’t…” He cleared his throat, cheeks heating for the wrong reasons. “That is to say, I don’t…”</p><p>“Hush, angel,” Crowley chuckled, kissing the curve of Aziraphale’s waist, his fingertips tracing the skin just above Aziraphale’s trousers. “You don’t need to have.  I only want to touch you.” He looked up at Aziraphale, his eyes wide and his mouth practically begging. <i>Say yes, please, let me…</i> “I want to see you in all your glory.”</p><p>Aziraphale swallowed and nodded, mesmerized.  Crowley’s grin as broad and full of teeth, and Aziraphale wasn’t sure whether or not he should have agreed when Crowley finished stripping him.  He hadn’t bared himself to another person like this since public baths had fallen out of fashion, and still, that had been different--none of them had been Crowley.</p><p>Crowley sat back on his haunches, wings half-furled, and his eyes raked hungrily over every inch of Aziraphale’s skin.  Aziraphale licked his lips, fear forgotten at the sight of Crowley looking back at him like that.  One deft hand reached out, uncharacteristically hesitant, and rested lightly on the bridge of his foot.</p><p>The smile Crowley gave him was achingly sincere. “Let me worship at your altar, angel.”</p><p>“Crowley, you mustn’t!” Aziraphale gasped, the blasphemy of it all thrilling through him.  Crowley, who’d refused to beg God’s forgiveness a second time, saying things like that to him, of all the Host.</p><p>Crowley’s hand slid up to his ankle, fingers wrapping loosely around flesh not touched by another in millennia, and Aziraphale wanted to beg him not to stop. </p><p>“There’s no one else but you, angel.  You’ve been my lodestone since before I thought I could ever want one again.  You’ve never steered me wrong.  I--” He chuckled to himself and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Angel, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.  Please, I only want to…”</p><p>Aziraphale nodded, and Crowley’s eyes were almost as brilliant as the smile that broke across his face like the dawn.</p>
<hr/><p>Crowley brushed his lips over Aziraphale’s quivering belly, somehow pleased with himself and content with the world and ready to crawl out of his own skin.  Aziraphale had let him touch every sacred inch of him, let Crowley press fervent kisses to those soft thighs, suck at that tender skin where leg joined hip, knead the plush flesh of his ass.  He’d even let Crowley make a few tentative moves toward inducing an ecstatic response, flushing and groaning when Crowley stimulated the right gland or touched the right nerve.</p><p>And Crowley had…</p><p>Crowley kissed his way over Aziraphale’s ribs, stopping his traitorous lips with that ethereal flesh.  He could only hope Aziraphale had just fucking tuned him out after the fiftieth time he’d offered some variant on ‘perfect, beautiful, divine’ in response to some new millimeter or so of skin.  Not that it wasn’t true--Aziraphale’s smile alone could break any heart capable of feeling--but there were an infinite variety of ways to communicate it without slobbering all over him like a lovesick drunk.</p><p>Aziraphale had practically climbed him, had wanted to be wrapped up in his wings, and it had been like getting struck by lightning when Aziraphale had gotten him off while sitting in his lap and telling him how much he was loved.  If Aziraphale had slipped up and used grace on accident and blasted him off the face of the firmament, it would have been worth it for that measure of unadulterated bliss.  </p><p>And what had Crowley given him in return?  Fuck-all.  Aziraphale was practically falling asleep on him, those perfectly-manicured hands long since gone soft and dreamy in his hair, barely stirring even to touch the wings Aziraphale had asked him to leave out.</p><p>Which was not precisely <i>nice</i>, he supposed, but validating--encouraging.  He’d taken pains to keep his wings in as fine a shape as they could be, and now he had an angel wanting to run his fingers through them.  It hadn’t been all for his own vanity after all.  Something about them, probably the novelty, had caught Aziraphale in the right mood, and they’d pleased him. Crowley had pleased him, and the angel had dug his fingers into the coverts, and it had lit a fire that might as well have melted his brain like beeswax in a blast furnace.</p><p>Crowley pushed himself up on one knee and pressed a kiss to the fine silver hair just above Aziraphale’s navel, letting his fingers tug gently at the crisp curls over Aziraphale’s sternum.  </p><p>Aziraphale had given him a second chance at this, a precious gift even without considering how he’d muffed it the first time, and he’d gone insipid and rambling.  The perfect physical expression of Heaven’s most loving angel, a manifestation worked by a master’s will since the beginning of time itself, and Crowley had knelt there like an idiot and called him beautiful a dozen times in a row.  He hadn’t even remembered to get rid of his genitals before they’d started this.  Aziraphale had discreetly pretended not to notice him miracling his pants clean after the first round, but it would have been asking a lot of a blind man to ignore the massive tent he’d pitched within minutes of getting his lips on those velvet cream thighs.</p><p>At least Aziraphale hadn’t seemed to take any of his soppy confessions to heart.  Just what the angel had always wanted, surely--a demon dumping all of his rubbish feelings out for him to sort through.  It wasn’t like Aziraphale had asked for that, love or no--hoping and believing and mustering bravery enough for both of them, all because Crowley’d lost his nerve when the chips were down.  Every word of it had been true, sure, but it wasn’t like Aziraphale loved him for his capacity to deliver pathetic soliloquies.</p><p>He blinked in surprise, caught off-guard again by the fact that Aziraphale loved him.  It was true, wasn’t it?  Aziraphale had said it.  Aziraphale had spent two weeks happy and at rest only when Crowley was holding him.  Aziraphale had saved him, had faced down Hell to do it.  It was the sort of knowledge that felt forbidden, a thing so awful and portentous and impossible that it warped reality around itself like a star collapsing to punch a hole through the fabric of the universe.  Inescapable and incomprehensible and amazing, the sort of thing he could spend the next thousand years trying to wrap his brain around and failing every time.</p><p>He rested his cheek on Aziraphale’s stomach and wrapped his arms around the angel’s waist.  Aziraphale loved him.</p><p>“Darling, do you think you could…” Aziraphale’s fingers were back in his hair, combing through it slowly, deliberately, as if he never intended to stop. “That is, if you’re going to just hold me, maybe you might, ah, move over a bit?”</p><p>“Am I squashing you, then?” Crowley went to straighten up, surprised.  Aziraphale had seemed to want little more than to hold him that first night back in the bookshop, but then maybe Crowley had just picked a particularly bad place to settle down.  He found Aziraphale’s fingers tightening against his scalp, just enough to keep him where he was. “Ah.  Angel?”</p><p>“I didn’t mean for you to get up,” Aziraphale said, thumb tracing a small circle just behind Crowley’s ear. “Just, maybe, instead of sprawling halfway across the bed like that, you could…”</p><p>Aziraphale let his legs splay a bit wider, canting his far knee out to make space between his thighs.  </p><p>Crowley’s heart skipped a beat. “Oh.”</p><p>“That is, if you want,” Aziraphale said quickly.</p><p>“Nah, it’s--” Crowley drew a shivery, shuddering breath. “My pleasure, angel.”</p><p>Aziraphale let go of his hair, and Crowley pushed himself up.  <i>If he wanted</i> to stretch out between the angel’s legs, drape himself over the angel’s belly, wrap his arms around the angel’s ribs.  His hands shook a little as he repositioned himself, careful not to press too hard on soft flesh, his own corporation suddenly seeming all knobs and sharp edges and bones against Aziraphale’s downy padding.  He imagined those opulent legs wrapped around his shoulders, his waist, as he coaxed climax after climax out of the angel’s sweet flesh.  He wanted Aziraphale undone with it, melting under it, forgetting every hurt and sorrow and care that had ever burdened him, joyous and glowing like a sun.</p><p>Crowley’s cock stirred back to full attention at that thought, and Crowley blessed himself for not getting rid of it when he’d had the chance not to be obvious about it.  Kind of Aziraphale to tell him it was all right if he left it, but he’d known the fastidious principality too long to think Aziraphale wouldn’t regret it.  He’d pitched a fit about paint on his coat; Crowley didn’t want to see disgust curdling that pretty face when it was a demon’s seed on his skin.  He slid farther down Aziraphale’s body, giving up a little contact in order to wedge his erection against the mattress, where it couldn’t get him into any trouble.</p><p>“Good, angel?” Crowley asked, once he’d settled in.  Aziraphale’s legs tightened against him, rucking up his pajamas in a few places and making Crowley wish he wasn’t a coward.  How blessed hard would it be to open his mouth and ask if maybe the angel wanted him naked as well? <i>Shall I take my own shirt off, too?  Or, maybe, you could do it for me?</i>  Two sentences, and such a payoff if the answer was yes.</p><p>“Yes,” Aziraphale sighed, hands finding Crowley’s shoulders.  One palm wrapped around the back of Crowley’s neck, loose and stroking, and the other settled on his shoulder blade.</p><p>Crowley nuzzled Aziraphale’s belly, sucking gently at the skin under his lips.  Aziraphale was naked and in his arms, that masterpiece of flesh and blood laid bare under his hands, the angel who’d fashioned it smiling at his touch.  Crowley couldn’t help but move his hand down again, run it lightly over the contours of that lovely knee, that round thigh.  Aziraphale shivered and clung to Crowley harder in response.</p><p>“Too much?” Crowley asked quietly.  Aziraphale wanted to be loved almost as badly as Crowley wanted to love him, but the dose made the poison, didn’t it?</p><p>“It’s just been so long,” Aziraphale said, his voice thick. “No one but you has even tried touching me like this since, well, since the Romans left.”</p><p>Crowley blinked at that, cataloging his own daring liberties down through the ages--his hands on Aziraphale’s shoulders, walking through the park arm in arm, a quick press of chest against chest and a rough thump on the back in greeting, a steadying arm slung around Aziraphale’s waist when the angel had one too many and refused to just miracle himself home.  Until the day he’d gotten the bright idea to demonstrate his angelic finery to the poor thing, it had never been more than brief and deniable.</p><p>“Your first time with anything passing for a cuddle since fucking Magnus Maximus got it in the neck was on the floor in the middle of my plant room?”</p><p>Aziraphale squirmed and clicked his tongue. “I’m an angel, Crowley.  We’re not meant to--”</p><p>“You’re meant to be loved,” Crowley said firmly, propping himself up on his elbows so that he could look Aziraphale in the eye.  The angel flushed and looked away, and Crowley wanted to nip him.  He sighed and got up, and Aziraphale shot him a look that was half panic and half plea. “None of that now.”</p><p>He pulled Aziraphale up until he was sitting, then arranged himself behind him, chest pressed flush against Aziraphale’s back.  He pulled Aziraphale into his lap properly, banishing his cock and not caring if the angel noticed or not.  It was the work of a moment to drag the blankets up over him, then wrap Aziraphale up properly in his wings, bundled and secure and warm in Crowley’s arms.  He looped his arms around Aziraphale’s chest under the blanket and laid his cheek on Aziraphale’s shoulder, eyes searching that sweet face.</p><p>“You were meant to be loved, and loved well.  You were meant for pleasure, and peace, and hope, and joy.  You’re so very, very brave, angel--” Aziraphale opened his mouth, and Crowley hissed. “You <i>are</i>.  Don’t start telling stupid lies about how anyone would have done the same.  We were all there, and you were the only one who kept your head and <i>did</i>.” Crowley squeezed him tight and pressed his lips to Aziraphale’s skin, and the angel subsided, his cheeks bright. “But the thing is, you don’t have to keep being brave about this.  I’m sorry it’s just me around to love you when you should have, I dunno, a herd of saints or whatever, however it goes when your lot’s off the leash and leading the masses back toward the light.  But since it’s just me, I intend to do it right.”</p><p>“Crowley, you were,” Aziraphale sighed, wrapping his hands around Crowley’s wrists. “You’re all I want, don’t you see?  Just this, here with you, on Earth with humanity going about their business and us left alone to help them along where we can.  Just this, with us not having to hide or look over our shoulders constantly.”</p><p>Crowley examined the stoic little smile that graced Aziraphale’s face, looking for the lie and finding only heart-breaking tenderness.  He kissed Aziraphale’s shoulder again. “You sure that’s all you want?”</p><p>“Well, you could…” Aziraphale bit his lip and raised his eyebrows hopefully. “That is, ah.  You didn’t get very far with the ecstasy.  It might be nice if you finished the job?”</p><p>“As much as you like, angel,” Crowley assured him, warmth pooling low in his belly.  He hadn’t wanted to push, hadn’t wanted to dive on ahead when Aziraphale had seemed receptive but not especially eager.  With Aziraphale asking, he didn’t need to be told twice.</p><p>Crowley rearranged the pillows so they could lean back a bit, Aziraphale’s weight solid and comforting against his chest, the angel still cocooned in blankets and feathers and looking content with his lot.  Crowley couldn’t help running his fingers through Aziraphale’s hair, and the angel snuggled more firmly against him, practically purring with it.</p><p>“I love you, angel,” Crowley said, recalling with a pang that small, hesitant <i>again?</i> when he’d first said it. “I’ve loved you for so long, and it felt like I was choking on it when I couldn’t just tell you.  I’ve wanted to give you so much, for so long.  Anything you want, it’s yours--all you have to do is say the word.  Just let me keep loving you.”</p><p>Aziraphale reached up and stroked his arm, fingers soft as a dove’s feathers over Crowley’s skin. “After this, I want to take a nap with you, and then I want to go somewhere we’ve never been, and try something we’ve never eaten, and take a walk on the promenade so we can hold hands and watch the sun set.”</p><p>“That sounds perfectly lovely,” Crowley laughed, kissing his temple.  Aziraphale looked away and squirmed, his smile going bashful.</p><p>“You’re not making fun, are you?”</p><p>“I would never.” Crowley bit his lip and then kissed him again, this time making Aziraphale’s nerves sing with it.</p><p>“<i>Oh.</i>” Aziraphale pressed his back hard against Crowley’s chest, fingers scrambling for Crowley’s hands. “Oh, yes--just like that!”</p><p>“Whatever you like, angel,” Crowley assured him.  He nudged a little more power into it, and Aziraphale’s head fell back against his shoulder.  Crowley smiled and kissed his cheek, and Aziraphale turned his face so that their lips met.  The angel’s kiss was hungry, and Crowley was happy to respond in kind until Aziraphale was overcome with it, panting and flushed and moaning. “Whatever you like.”</p>
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